Dropped Names by Frank Langella Page B

hysterical, from your guts bellowing that took on a life of its own, causing us to gasp for air, hold our stomachs, and roll around on the marble floor like drunken idiots for ten minutes. When actors lose it, they lose it bigtime.
    C olleen and I were never intimate friends, but I was grateful she’d overcome her prejudice toward me and from then on, whenever I saw her it was free and easy. One evening I asked her how she was enjoying her reign as president of Actors’ Equity. She stared hard at me and said: “Big fucking mistake.”

ANTHONY PERKINS
    T ony Perkins was, among other complicated things, gay. He died after a long battle with AIDS in 1992 at the age of sixty, having finally confessed his secret. But I doubt it was a confession that gave him much relief.
    He was five years my senior, and a huge rising star when I came to New York in 1960. A total original in looks, voice, and style, he was long, lanky, and offbeat handsome. His performances in the films Friendly Persuasion in 1956 and The Matchmaker in 1958 are so winning and comically skilled that his signature role of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho only two years later seemed to stunt his potential and most probably sounded the death knell of his promising career. He was only twenty-eight years old and from then on appeared to be living a trapped life. An indelible character he could never shake and a sexual nature he could not celebrate.
    I first met him in 1967 in my dressing room at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre when I was playing William Shakespare in William Gibson’s play A Cry of Players . I was twenty-nine years old. He was thirty-four and on the make. In the acting company of the play was an eccentric guy who had a small role and lived in a teepee he had set up in the Beaumont’s vast backstage area. From it came the distinct odor of cannabis and in and out of it went a phalanx of young men.
    One night there was a knock on my dressing room door after the performance. When I opened it, there stood the lovely Mr. Perkins, hands stuffed in his pants pockets, hair sweetly messy.
    â€œHi. I’m Tony. Can I come in?”
    â€œSure.”
    After the usual backstage chat, I said:
    â€œYou know, people keep telling me I’m a young you, but I don’t think we look alike. Do you?”
    We both stood in front of my makeup mirror shoulder to shoulder and stared at each other.
    â€œI don’t see it,” he said. “How big is your cock?”
    â€œI didn’t bring it with me tonight,” I joked.
    We turned and faced each other in silence. There is a way one man stares at another when a sexual encounter may be in the offing that is completely unlike the uncomplicated gaze exchanged with no hint of its possibility. Tony’s gaze was profoundly of the former.
    â€œI’m going back to visit Tom in his tent. If you feel like it, stop in.”
    T om’s teepee could not hold a candle to the swank New York apartments in which the gay community of the 1960s often gathered. Famous older men in the closet had secret evenings to which all the young meat in New York was invited. The entrance fee meant stripping at the door, donning only a towel, and spending the rest of the evening so attired. An upscale elegant steamless bathhouse at which Tony was reputedly a frequent visitor. He held a unique position, certainly, being both a celebrity and youngish meat.
    I always felt in his company that he wanted to be fathered. Even though I was the younger, he related to me like a teenage boy in constant need of approval. His first impulsive question in my dressing room that night in 1967, “How big is your cock?” may have been more than a come-on. In a little boy’s mind, Daddy’s is always bigger.
    Skittish, compulsively flirtatious, and often sexually charged, he seemed always to be flinching from an expected whack to the back of his head.
    Sweet or sour; a master