Son of the stage and screen character-actor Osgood Perkins (after whom he would name his first son), Tony hardly knew his father, whose most memorable screen role was in Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932), as the gangster who loses his girl to the Al Capone prototype (played by Paul Muni). Perkins père is exceptional, and the movie is way up at the top of the list in the gangster genre. In 1937, when his son was just five, Osgood Perkins died. So Tony followed in his father’s footsteps, but reached a level of success and fame that quite eclipsed his dad’s. In other words, Perkins was from an actor’s family, show business was in his blood, and he worked right to the end of his life when AIDS killed him in 1992 when he was only sixty.
He left behind two sons, Osgood and Elvis, with their beautiful mother Berry (for Berinthia) Berenson, sister to actress Marisa Berenson, both granddaughters of famed designer Elsa Schiaparelli, grand-nieces of art collector—historian Bernard Berenson. The two had married in 1973, after years of rumors that Tony was gay. Berry and Tony were virtually an ideal couple—obviously adoring each other—fun to be around. The two boys (very young when I knew them in the seventies) were a source of pride and happiness. I remember hanging out with them all in their Manhattan apartment a few times while Tony was doing Equus on Broadway—just the two kids, Tony, Berry, Cybill Shepherd and me. Cybill and I loved both of them. Berry was a beautiful blond angel, a talented and serious still photographer, a patient, loving mother and a supportive, often selflessly caring wife. She took an unusual and evocative photo of Cybill alone in a New York diner for the cover of a jazz album Shepherd recorded with Stan Getz (Mad About the Boy).
We had first met, Tony and I, on the set of Catch-22 in Guaymas, Mexico, early in 1969; Welles introduced us between shots on the Mike Nichols picture. (Orson and I had just begun our marathon interview sessions which eventually became the book This Is Orson Welles.) I barely had time to tell Tony how terrific I thought he had been a year or so before in a little-known but enthralling picture he had done with Tuesday Weld called Pretty Poison (1968), one of his best performances, though the direction and script unfortunately were not up to the basic material or the two superb stars. The first chance we had to really talk a little was probably about three years later at a Hollywood party hosted by the agent Sue Mengers. Sue’s first two clients after her switch from agent’s secretary to agent were Anthony Newley and Anthony Perkins. I was her third. Pretty soon she had just about everyone else, too, from Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal to Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn. Tony and I, therefore, had Sue in common, too. Welles and Mengers alone could cover a year of conversations, and so whenever the two of us met over the precious few years we knew each other, we always picked up where we had left off.
On the sunlit porch of an afternoon party somewhere in L.A., I recall sitting with him while he told me with great glee the plot of the murder-mystery screenplay he was writing with Stephen Sondheim, which eventually became The Last of Sheila (1973), in which Tony did not appear. All the characters in the film were based on people he and I both knew—various Hollywood movie people, stars and filmmakers of all kinds—and Tony excitedly elaborated at length on who the prototypes were. He was very funny and wonderfully charismatic as he conspiratorially let me in on the whole thing. Tony also loved movies. That was the third thing we had in common, and the fourth was that he knew pictures, was very film literate, thus there were numerous allusions to movies we both liked, as Tony sketched in the story line of his script.
When we later saw each other in New York, where we had more of a chance to relax and just talk casually, have a meal, keep talking—something of a luxury in Los Angeles or New York show-business circles—Tony and Berry were so easy to be unbuttoned with, to be candid, unafraid of being judged or misunderstood, or used. Even more of a luxury elsewhere. That’s what they were like individually; together, it was almost too good to be true.
Most of the pictures he did after Psycho and The Trial were not up to the caliber of the Hitchcock and Welles, though none of these subsequent films were totally without interest and, sometimes, had considerable merit. He even acted for French master Claude Chabrol in two pictures, The Champagne Murders (1967) and (with Orson) Ten Days’ Wonder (1972), but they weren’t necesarily Chabrol’s finest hours, though intriguing, and in the latter a unique chance to see Welles and Perkins together. Sidney Lumet’s very smoothly done all-star Agatha Christie piece, Murder on the Orient Express (1974), was probably Tony’s only real hit until the two Psycho sequels he did, in 1983 (Psycho II), and in 1986 (Psycho III), the second of which he directed as well. There was even a Psycho 4: The Beginning in 1990 for cable TV. In show business, it’s hard to get away from your primary success (maybe it’s hard in any business). Perkins also directed Lucky Stiff in 1988, a bizarre black comedy about a guy who falls prey to a modern family of cannibals. Tony’s humor was always pretty dark, filled with irony and an ability to see several viewpoints at once.
Four years later, Tony died. Afterward, there was some talk about the AIDS question, of course, but who cared? He was gone. I heard that Berry and the boys were devastated, naturally, even having lived for well over a year with the knowledge of where Tony’s illness was going. I wasn’t really filled in on all this until nine years after the fact, when a catastrophic tragedy brought Berry’s lovely sister Marisa Berenson and me together again. We had known each other in the seventies; I had been with Cybill to Marisa’s wedding; she was as darling as her sister. Berry was on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. When I heard that sweet Berry was a part of this horror, one of my first thoughts was that now she and Tony would be reunited. Marisa told me she felt the same way, while on a plane ride we coincidentally shared just a week later. Marisa was still in shock, cried on my shoulder for a while, told me that Berry and Tony had had a very tough time, Berry nursing him to the end. In 1992, Tony had died on September 12; precisely nine years later, Berry was killed. My prayer is that they are finally together again, and are watching over their sons, as I remember them doing in their New York apartment thirty years ago.
Anthony Perkins is brilliant as Joseph K. in Orson Welles’ haunting adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel The Trial (1962), shot all over Europe but especially at the then-deserted Gare d’Orsay in Paris.
Born Anthony Perkins, April 4, 1932, New York, NY; died September 12, 1992, Hollywood, CA.
Selected starring features (with director):
1953: The Actress (George Cukor)
1956: Friendly Persuasion (William Wyler)
1957: Fear Strikes Out (Robert Mulligan)
1958: This Angry Age (René Clément); The Matchmaker (Joseph Anthony)
1959: Green Mansions (Mel Ferrer)
1960: Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
1961: Goodbye Again (Anatole Litvak)
1962: The Trial (Orson Welles)
1965: The Fool Killer (Servando González)
1966: Is Paris Burning? (Clément)
1967: The Champagne Murders (Claude Chabrol)
1968: Pretty Poison (Noel Black)
1970: Catch-22 (Mike Nichols)
1972: Ten Days’ Wonder (Chabrol); The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (John Huston)
1974: Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet)
1978: Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph)
1979: Winter Kills (William Richert)
1983: Psycho II (Richard Franklin)
1984: Crimes of Passion (Ken Russell)
1986: Psycho III (also directed)
20
FRANK SINATRA
One of the first things I remembered when I heard that Frank Sinatra had died was his parting wish to a concert audience at the Royal Albert Hall in London one of the two times I saw him perform there in the seventies and eighties: “May you be happy and wealthy, may your children prosper, may you live to be one hundred,” he had said, “and may the last voice you hear … be mine!” And something like ten thousand British people cheered wild
ly, as though death surely would lose its sting were it to be accompanied by the sound of Sinatra. Certainly his voice had been present the world over at so many of what the French call les petits morts: how many fervent kisses, passionate embraces and epiphanies had been achieved with Sinatra singing in the background! His songs formed not only his own autobiography but served as similar touchstones for millions the world over, from the early forties to the present. Yet, as things turned out, the man who had kept company with and for so many, who had most feared and dreaded loneliness—and therefore, by extension, dying alone—had sadly gone out with great conflict and without the comforting companionship for which he had so yearned. The ultimate singer—the cocksman personified—who wooed and won all the world’s beauties, had, according to his youngest daughter, ended his life in an unfulfilling relationship, one that his last road manager said he endured because he felt he was deserving of punishment. His old pal Jerry Lewis, who phoned Sinatra often in his last years, agreed: “Yeah, Frank was pretty good at beating himself up.”
Sinatra’s epoch-making theme albums of 1953 and 1954, Songs for Young Lovers and Swing Easy, happened to coincide with the start of my own serious teenage dating. We didn’t notice at the time that these mood-sustaining “concept” albums (with which he had experimented in the forties) essentially invented the long-playing record as an art form. In 1954, when Sinatra won his Oscar for From Here to Eternity, many experienced the most jubilant reaction they would ever have to any Academy Award; listening to the radio (television still not quite ubiquitous), I myself leapt up with such excitement that the rug slipped out from under me and I almost broke my neck. After that (twenty years before I finally met Sinatra), I made sure to see any movie he was in, though he wasn’t in too many good ones. There had been the very young and innocent Sinatra of the three early Gene Kelly musicals—Anchors Aweigh (1945), Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949) and, best of all, the wonderful and joyous Kelly–Stanley Donen—directed On the Town (1949)–in which Frank’s essential sweetness was most guilelessly represented. Then came the somewhat dangerous, loose-cannon Sinatra of pictures like From Here to Eternity or Suddenly and Young at Heart (both 1954) or The Joker Is Wild (1957); the romantic, wise-guy, swinging Frankie of Guys and Dolls or The Tender Trap (both 1955), High Society (1956) or Pal Joey (1957). And, most arresting, there was the dramatic, sensitive and complicated loser of his finest picture-work in Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running (1958), Frank Capra’s A Hole in the Head (1959), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer.
Frank Sinatra is superb as Frankie Machine, the heroin addict, in Otto Preminger’s adaptation of the Nelson Algren novel The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), the first major U.S. film to deal with drugs.
Those kind of Sinatra memories, however, were very much like countless others’ around the globe, but the few encounters I had with the man himself between the mid-seventies and the start of the nineties came rushing back when I heard of his death—as well as memories of things I had heard about Frank from others who had known him. From Barbara Ford, John Ford’s daughter, for example—her father having directed the strikingly beautiful and talented Ava Gardner in probably her best performance, in Mogambo (1953), shot in Africa during the lowest ebb in Sinatra’s life. Though he was madly in love with her—and she with him (he divorced the mother of his three children to marry her)—his career was at its absolute nadir, his vocal cords having hemorrhaged, his records no longer selling, his movie and recording contracts canceled. Sinatra came to Africa, in desperate shape, to visit Ava. Ford used to order him around jokingly: “Make the spaghetti, Frank.” And he did, rather happily, Barbara Ford remembered. Ava Gardner, at her hottest then, called Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn and asked him as a favor to cast Frank as Maggio in the Fred Zinnemann movie of James Jones’ novel From Here to Eternity, John Ford seconded the idea, and Sinatra got the part—at $1,000 a week for eight weeks. That’s after being a huge recording and picture star only four years earlier. Such are the perils of American fame.
When Sinatra had left Africa to start Eternity, and Ava had finished the only role in her career for which she was nominated by the Academy for Best Actress, cinematographer Robert Surtees and his wife accompanied her to London, where she had an abortion. Evidently, her fateful decision (she never had children) was somewhat in retaliation for his chronic fooling around. Sinatra didn’t know about this until after the fact, and he was devastated. The two were divorced—she left him—within a couple of years, but both seemed to carry the torch for each other through their lives. I met Ava in the mid-eighties, and she still spoke very warmly of him, just as there was always an especially tender sound to Frank’s voice whenever her name came up.
The first personal contact I ever had with Sinatra was a nasty telegram he sent me. Cybill Shepherd and I were living together then, and I had just produced for her (not very well but I didn’t know that at the time) a Cole Porter album, and sent copies to several performers we both admired, hoping for some endorsements which could be used as liner notes. We got a few (Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Orson Welles), and then came Frank’s wire:
The innocent Frank Sinatra: with Gene Kelly, Jules Munshin and the real Statue of Liberty on location for On the Town (1949). Sinatra’s favorite song from the original Broadway show, “Lonely Town,” was never shot—much to his angry disappointment—but he recorded it definitively seven years later on the album classic Where Are You?
Heard the record. It’s marvelous what some guys will do for a dame. Better luck next time.
Sinatra
Well, Cybill and I tried to pretend to each other that there was a missing period after “marvelous,” and let it go. I finally met him not too long afterward—to be exact, on February 9, 1975—when he hosted the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement tribute to Orson Welles. Actually, I thanked him for his telegram. He looked slightly bewildered, but when I added that we thought it was funny, he smiled a bit uncomfortably and said, “Yeah, I thought you’d get a kick out of it.” The subject never came up again.
That year, the AFI’s Welles gala—only their third such affair—was not really a popular event in Hollywood since a lot of people thought there were many others who should have been honored before Orson. (It had come about because George Stevens, Jr., had the noble idea that perhaps the prize could be used not only to commemorate past achievement but also to attract future work, especially for the not exactly studio-friendly Welles. It didn’t.) So the dinner was not as star-studded as everyone would have liked, and therefore Sinatra’s participation was all the more important.
Of course, Sinatra had always been extremely fond of Welles—they were born the same year, 1915, only seven months apart: Orson on May 6, Frank on December 12—and Welles had always spoken very warmly of the singer. Sinatra had been the first investor for Welles’ ill-fated, never-completed modern version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote: in 1956, he gave Welles $25,000 with which to start the work. Frank’s enduring nickname for Orson was “Jake”—Welles claimed he never knew why, but perhaps it’s because “jake” is a slang synonym for “good” or “great” or “fine,” as in “everything’s jake,” and that was certainly Sinatra’s opinion of Welles. In any event, Welles named the leading character in his last film Jake—the still-to-be-edited The Other Side of the Wind—with John Huston playing the part, a legendary macho film director called Jake Hannaford: certainly an inside tribute to Sinatra. The night of the AFI fête, Frank sang with great gusto a special version of Rodgers and Hart’s “The Lady Is a Tramp,” rewritten to proclaim that Orson was “a Champ!”—at that time still a quite controversial opinion not only in Hollywood but in America as a whole. Yet “controversial” never bothered Sinatra: he had often championed unpopular causes, fought for the underdog. His presence that night had deeply touched Welles.
They had known each other since the 1930s in New York, when Sinatra was
with Harry James and then with Tommy Dorsey. After Sinatra’s false retirement (1971—73), when he returned with an album (and TV special) titled Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, Welles had laughed: “Where did that ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ come from I wonder?! No one’s ever once called him that before!” It had always been “Frankie” or “The Voice.” “The Chairman of the Board” came later, from New York deejay William B. Williams. In the forties, on radio’s Your Hit Parade, it had been “F.S. for L.S., Frank Sinatra for Lucky Strike, saying … ‘Put Your Dreams Away’ …” After Humphrey Bogart died in 1957, Sinatra eventually took over Bogie’s title as “Leader of the Rat Pack,” or “the Clan.” But with “Ol’ Blue Eyes,” Sinatra had reinvented himself again, as he had when he went from being the almost femininely vulnerable mama’s boy–crooner of the forties to America’s top swinger of the fifties and sixties.
A year or so after the Welles tribute, Cybill and I were invited to be guests at the Sinatra table at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, where he was performing. “The show starts at midnight,” his secretary had said, “but Frank will be on the Jerry Lewis telethon at eleven-fifteen, if you want to watch.” It was early in September 1976, and Cybill and I were in our suite, with both television sets on as we dressed for Sinatra’s second show. In those days, there was only one fellow who brought the high rollers to town, and that was old Caesar’s countryman from Hoboken, New Jersey.
Jerry Lewis, live from the Sahara down the street, had been exhorting viewers to pledge money to the muscular dystrophy campaign, and now Jerry gave an elaborate introduction for Sinatra, who came out, sang a quick, up-tempo number, and then told the audience that, unbeknownst to Jerry, he had brought a friend along to help him. He pointed off left and the camera panned over to show Dean Martin walking out from behind the set. After the phenomenally successful Martin and Lewis team broke up with acrimony twenty years earlier, the two had barely seen each other, much less been seen together, so this was quite an event (see Lewis and Martin chapters).
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