Anthony Perkins: Split Image (Advocate Life Stories) (Paperback)

~ Charles Winecoff (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Paramount groomed him to replace the late James Dean and become Hollywood's hottest heartthrob. But his landmark performance as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho killed that-and spawned an image of Anthony Perkins that eerily paralleled his conflicted, fractured off-screen life.

Anthony Perkins: Split Image insightfully and comprehensively documents the life of this great actor, who was forced to act the part of ladies' man while privately struggling with his own homosexuality, and chronicles his complicated search for acceptance.

Newly revised and updated for this tenth anniversary edition, Anthony Perkins: Split Image is both a harrowing look at life in the Hollywood closet and a poignant human drama that will change your vision of Anthony Perkins forever.

"Riveting...With his laser-beam of an eye, Winecoff lights up the hidden corners of Hollywood's golden age, as well as a dark age of homosexuality that needs to be understood by anyone who didn't live through it.It's a page-turner." -James Gavin, author of Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker

"Charles Winecoff is a clever biographer. With his inside, creepy examination of Anthony Perkins, I was mesmerized by a dude I never thought I'd be able to stomach for more than a paragraph. Well done." -E!'s Ted Casablanca

"Anthony Perkins: Split Image is one of the deepest, darkest Hollywood stories ever told." -Robert Hofler, author of The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson

"Told with empathy and a sagacious eye for detail, Winecoff's lively chronicle of one of the screen's more formidable, if underrated, leading men perhaps should have been called Brokeback Hollywood Hills."-Stephen M. Silverman, author of David Lean and Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies

"An important chronicle of a time when gay was still the ultimate taboo, one that Hollywood had especially little use for as it aggressively sold illusion and lies."-Michael Musto, from his Foreword

About the Author

Charles Winecoff has written for many magazines, including Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, and The New Yorker. He currently works as Senior Writer on the long-running TV series E! True Hollywood Story. He lives in Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Advocate Books (May 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555839509
• ISBN-13: 978-1555839505
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #393,076 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sensitive, layered portrait of a complicated man, May 30, 2006

By	Karen Kelly (Milford, PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is one of the best Hollywood bios around. While numerous authors rehash the tired stories of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and others (for the 10th or 11th time - and who cares) this book opens new, original territory by looking at the life and times of Tony Perkins. The author first published the book ten years ago and this is a great update - no one else has come along to do a better job either. Tony Perkins lived on the cusp of the social revolution, balancing between the uptight propriety of the 50s with the psycho/sexual upheaval of the 60s and 70s. Winecoff meticulously lays out this world, and Perkins difficult and often troubled, sometimes comical, walk through it. Tons of interviews and vivid descriptions of people and places makes Tony pop off the page in this "true Hollywood story" that is hard to out down. Winecoff's timing is impeccable - the book is a fast, fun read as well as an informative one. The reissue is more tightly woven (I read the first version when it came out ten years ago). The author has grown more sophisticated and observant with passing years, as all good writers should. The final scene, September 11th and all, is a fitting tribute to changing times and the end of an era.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Essential Anthony Perkins, April 19, 2007

By	Elton T. Elliott - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As an actor, Anthony Perkins has always fascinated me. In every role that I ever saw him play, he had this quality about him that made you feel that if you didn't listen to every word he said and watch every movement that he made, you were going to miss something of major importance. It's called stage presence and he had it by the bucketfuls. He was of course most noted for his portrayal of Norman Bates in PSYCHO and he captured that character so well that it was both the blessing and the curse of his career. Already, before Hitchcock's masterpiece, the powers that be behind Perkins' acting career saw him as a replacement for James Dean or as the new Gary Cooper or someone like him. They wrongly saw him as a macho romantic lead but after PSYCHO, they and the movie public only wanted him to play variations of the Norman Bates character. Charles Winecoff, in his revised tenth anniversary edition of his Perkins biography, ANTHONY PERKINS: SPLIT IMAGE captures valiantly both the personal and professional life of a Hollywood icon.

Perkins' acting career didn't begin on the movie screen; it began on the stage. His father was the famed actor, Osgood Perkins, who died during a perfomance at the age of thirty-seven when Anthony was only five. His mother was connected to theater people and saw that he learned his craft as a teenager in summer stock productions. Before his appearance in the movie PSYCHO, he had played the lead in at least two Broadway shows, one of which was as Eugene Gant in Ketti Frings' play LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL based on the Thomas Wolfe novel of the same name. Eugene Gant's sensitive character was one that would have suited Perkins' personality well and if the movie mobuls could have seen that these kinds of roles rather than the romantic lead roles were who Anthony should play, his film career might have taken a happier, more successful turn.

Anthony hadn't been in Hollywood long when he met Tab Hunter and the tongues began to wag concerning both men's sexual preference. Homosexuality in the 1950's and 1960's was not something to be tolerated in an actor's personal life and Anthony was quickly persuaded to not be seen with Tab in public too frequently. (Tab's autobiography indicated as well that he too was told to avoid too much contact with Anthony.) At the time, to make your homosexuality too public would have been a sure-fire way to kill a career before it even got started. Before, and after Tab Hunter, Perkins was linked with other (secretly) gay men, but psycho-analysis was revered at the time, and Anthony yearned to be as straight as so many people wished him to be. Why wouldn't he in the poisonous atmosphere of the time. At around forty, he met and married Berry Berenson and fathered two sons and I think for the rest of his life was convinced that his newly found heterosexuality and his role as husband and father was his salvation; at least that is what he told people.

The many miscastings and the perception of those who handed out the movie roles to Anthony Perkins that America couldn't handle an alternate lifestyle, hurt Perkins' acting career and he tried his hand at directing both plays and films with limited success. One of the reasons pointed out in the book for that limited success was Anthony's lack of confidence in himself. I tend to agree because when you are told constantly that the core of who and what you are is insufficient, that would make you lack confidence in yourself. But, in spite of that, there are enough gems in the theater and film work of Anthony Perkins that has to apoligize to no one and I for one salute him as one of my Hollywood heros.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A shame you did it all at twenty-six, August 18, 2009

By	F. J. Craveiro de Carvalho (Coimbra, Portugal) - See all my reviews

If I remember it well the films where Mr Perkins appeared and I watched were "Psycho", inevitably, and "La décade prodigieuse" by Claude Chabrol. On "Psycho" there is nothing new to be said and Chabrol's movie was interesting.
Towards the end of the book under review, someone who had been very close to Mr Perkins is quoted as saying:

"That Tony never fulfilled himself is a tragedy. He never did anything optimum. And yet he was optimum."

Well, the notion of "optimum" varies but, discarding that, frankly, that was not the impression I got from the book and if we go by the first sentence then most lives are certainly tragedies.
In my opinion, what was really sad in his professional life was the fact of having achieved a peak, never to be repeated, at an early age.
To use words by Tim Rice, for the musical "Evita",

What happens now, where do you go from here?
For someone on top of the world
The view is not exactly clear
A shame you did it all at twenty-six
...

Much worse, was that he would be linked to the Norman Bates's character all his acting life. This surely must have affected his later career and the choices he made. Especially since, as opposed to photography or painting, cinema is an art where you depend on other people heavily.
As I suggested above, I do not think that Mr Perkins was outstandingly gifted. However, I would not say that most actors are and yet they go on to win Oscars or similar important prizes.
On the non-professional side, unfortunately Mr Perkins was a deeply troubled person. But, throughout his life, he met people who loved and cared about him.
I enjoyed, if such a verb is appropriate, knowing a lot more about actor and man. This is a well written, highly informative and well documented biography.