“Although he at first resisted, Perkins returned to Norman Bates again and again, in one form or other. Norman’s twitchy eccentricity seeped into many of Perkins’ post-Psycho performances that preceded the run of sequels.”
When Alfred Hitchcock wrapped Psycho (1960), it was years before the sequel became commonplace. No one expected Ben Hur (1959) or Spartacus (1960) to continue on with new adventures. “The End” meant just that, for the story and the characters. So it may have come as a surprise to Anthony Perkins when his Norman Bates character was revived thirteen years later in Psycho II (1983). In some ways, however, he had never stopped playing him.
Anthony Perkins was born in 1932, the year Adolf Hitler seized power. Perkins was the son of the actor James Ripley Osgood Perkins, who died onstage when Tony was five. Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War and surviving the death of a parent must certainly have affected him. In any case, there’s an unease built into his screen personae whether he’s playing high-strung baseball player Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out (1957) or Norman Bates.
“Psycho begins with the normal,” writes Robin Wood, “and draws us steadily deeper and deeper into the abnormal; it opens by making us aware of time, and ends with a situation in which time has ceased to exist.”1 It’s difficult to imagine the world before Psycho and its countless imitators. Known as the eccentric director of big-budget, wide-screen Technicolor spectacles, Hitchcock planned to make Psycho for $800,000, even then not a large sum for a major motion picture. It was shot by John L. Russell with a get-it-done-quick sensibility learned from television. From the success of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hitchcock sensed that movie audiences were ready for a good scare. The slashing violins of Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack were vital to creating tension in the viewer. Although cinematic innovations were few, the film was notable as a triumph of marketing and for elevating Anthony Perkins to screen immortality. It also marked a shift in attitudes about sex as the 1960s began. David Thomson writes:
The subversive secret was out — truly this medium was prepared for an outrage in which sex and violence were no longer games but were in fact everything. Psycho was so blatant that audiences had to laugh at it, to avoid the giddy swoon of evil and ordeal. That title warned that the central character was a bit of a nut, but the deeper lesson was that the audience in its self-inflicted experiment with danger might be crazy, too. Sex and violence were ready to break out, and censorship crumpled like an old lady’s parasol. The orgy had arrived.2
No matter the subject matter, Hitchcock stressed the idea of “pure film” where the pictures tell the story. Perkins, with his expressive face and physical style of acting, is well suited to a Hitchcock movie. As Norman, he’s full of nervous tics one moment and longing gazes toward his female co-stars the next. As such, he’s the perfect foil for Hitchcock, who was known to be uncomfortable with women. Writes Robin Wood: “Hitchcock isn’t interested in acting, certain actors, left to their own devices, are able to seize their chances and create their own performances independently; there is more reason to deduce that there are certain performances — or more exactly, certain roles — which arouse in Hitchcock a particular creative interest.”3
As a child, Hitchcock was required to stand at the foot of his mother Emma’s bed and report on his perceived transgressions, something that continued into adolescence. In Joseph Stefano’s screenplay of Psycho, the mother of Norman, or at least the part of her that survives in his head, is all-powerful. “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” he says. Perkins plays the dual role of Norman and the deceased Mrs. Bates. The homicidal maniac as cross-dresser is another aspect of Psycho that wasn’t “finished.” Twenty years later, Michael Caine would put on the wig in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980).
Returning to the United States, Perkins took on the role of yet another Norman type, as Dennis Pitt in Pretty Poison (1968), directed by Noel Black. Dennis is the proverbial “clean-cut young man,” with a button-down collar and sport coat. He’s also on probation for arson. Although Perkins was in his mid-thirties, Dennis is shown romancing a high school cheerleader, Sue Ann (Tuesday Weld). Unlike Norman, who’s ambiguous about sex due to his Mother fixation, Dennis is clearly heterosexual and sets his sight on Sue Ann, the “pretty poison” of the title, the moment he arrives in town. He creates an elaborate fantasy for her benefit about being a secret agent. Dennis doesn’t have Norman’s stutter, and the nervous mannerisms are toned down. By comparison, he’s a smooth operator. Initially, it seems the seventeen-year-old blonde is being naively drawn in. It turns out that small town Sue Ann is a sexual predator and the one with homicidal tendencies. “What’s a matter, need a pill?” she asks Dennis when he can’t immediately perform in bed. She slugs a night watchman with a wrench when he stumbles upon their espionage games, killing him and covering it up with a fire. She later shoots her own mother and enlists Dennis as accomplice, essentially becoming the domineering mother. Sue Ann tells him they’re now as good as married. Of course, he’s unable to consummate this marriage. Useless to her, she pins the murder on him.
Perkins became a star at a time when homosexual acts could be punished by Biblical-sounding “sodomy” laws. Gays were routinely hounded by the police. It’s no wonder he tried to conceal his homosexuality and “cure” himself. Unlike one of his characters, he was able to function with women. His marriage to actress Berry Berenson produced two sons, Osgood and Elvis. Tragically, on September 11, 2001, Berry was on American Airlines Flight 11. Osgood, today known professionally as Oz, played the young Norman in Psycho II (1983). In that film, Norman is released from the mental institution and returns to run the Bates Motel.
Taking on directing duties himself in Psycho III (1986), Perkins indulges in some of Hitchcock’s trademark mirroring with Maureen (Diane Scarwid), a double of Leigh’s Marion Crane. Maureen dumbfounds Norman by showing up at the motel not only looking like Marion but carrying an eerily similar monogrammed suitcase initialed M.C. In another tip of the hat to Hitchcock, Maureen has left a convent under circumstances that borrow directly from Vertigo (1958). Norman seems to genuinely love her, making her demise inevitable, if accidental.
Although Robert Bloch’s source novel for Psycho was loosely based on the case of real-life serial killer Ed Gein, the story also has its roots in Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of split personality, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In 1989, Perkins played that dual role in Edge of Sanity, directed by Gérard Kikoïne. Jack Hyde’s motivator is cocaine, not a deceased mother whispering in his ear, but the end result of murdered women is the same.
Keeping secrets was something Perkins felt compelled to do in real life. Although he never publicly divulged his sexual orientation, his same-sex relationships were common knowledge in Hollywood. Few have had a better platform to bare their soul than with the perfect cover of Norman Bates, Dennis Pitt, and Joseph K. Shortly before his death from AIDS, Perkins made A Demon in My View (1992), a German production directed by Petra Haffter based on a novel by Ruth Rendell. His character, Arthur Johnson, is still another Norman variant. Arthur is a strangler of women who confuses his prey with the store mannequins he obsesses over, including one dressed like the aunt who raised him. A sequence that shows his hand running along a victim’s clothing toward her neck is completely unsettling.
McBride, Joseph. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career.Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Thomson, David. The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder.New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Welles, Orson and Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998,
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
- Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 142-43. [↩]
- David Thomson, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder(New York: Basic Books, 2009), 2-3. [↩]
- Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 215. [↩]
- Joseph McBride, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles: A Portrait of an Independent Career (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 94. [↩]
- Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 244-48. [↩]