Anthony Perkins, closeted gay actor
Anthony Perkins was an actor who had affairs with A-list homosexuals: Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Rudolf Nureyev, Leonard Bernstein, James Dean, and Stephen Sondheim. The one that lasted, however, was with dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, with whom Perkins had a six-year relationship before his 1973 marriage to photographer Berry Berenson, the sister of actress Marisa Berenson. Dale, who had been Perkins’ understudy in the stage musical
Greenwillow, also married in 1973 (must have been something in the water that year). Perkins was 41 years old at the time of his marriage and said he had sex with a woman for the first time just a year before that, at age 39, with his co-star Victoria Principal during filming of
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.
Perkins was a veteran of stage, screen and TV, even earning an Oscar nomination for
Friendly Persuasion, but he lived in utter fear that
Confidential magazine would out him, as it did with Tab Hunter, one of his early lovers. Perkins had two sons with Berenson, but he died of AIDS in 1992 at age sixty; he did not acknowledge during his lifetime that he had the disease, even though the
National Enquirer broke the story two years before his death.
His performance as Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s film
Psycho is unforgettable, but his career went into decline soon afterward. Perkins was known to frequent gay porn stores and gay movie houses in Times Square, NYC, where he watched men have sex in the stairwells. For over a decade Perkins lived in a platonic relationship with photographer Helen Merrell, a dominating force of a woman 14 years his senior. Merrell went on to become an influential theatrical agent and philanthropist. In the late 1950s, Perkins released three pop song albums, but a career as a singer never materialized, although he did have several successful singing roles in Broadway musicals.
His widow, Berry Berenson, was killed while aboard American Airlines flight 11 as it crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
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