Attempting a biography of someone who's known for witholding facts about himself and leading a double life is a challenge. Winecoff talked to something like 700 people, going back to Perkins' childhood and college days (surprise guest star: Mr Rogers. they went to school together). He does a pretty good job of showing what Perkins was like as a friend and fellow actor, though he never gets under his skin. I actually found this more satisfying than those biographies that purport to have the key to the thing that drove the person's life, something I don't think is accurate.

Anyway, Tony Perkins's father was a famous actor who died when he was 5; his mother was domineering and withholding. She was in a long term relationship with another woman. Through his life older women were drawn to him and took take care of him and he lived a closeted gay life until he made a conscious decision to become straight, encouraged by his therapist, Mildred Newman of How To Be Your Own Best Friend fame. He was convinced that all the problems in his life were because he was living the “empty” gay lifestyle, and he wanted a conventional family. He married Berry Berenson and they had two kids and apparently a happy marriage, though the book has plenty of gossip about whether he continued to have gay relationships. He died of AIDS. He was driven by worry about how good his acting was and he could be cruel to people who cared about him; he was unhappy for much of his life.

I hadn’t known a lot about his career beyond The Friendly Persuasion where I developed a crush on him, and Psycho. The book goes into great detail about his stage and movie jobs which I found interesting, along with the descriptions of other theater people. I’m surprised at how many of his movies I’d seen and forgotten, and enjoyed the 60s-70s-80s nostalgia. It’s a good biography though I was annoyed by the constant foreshadowing (“Ten years later they would meet again under very different circumstances.”) ( )

Berry Berenson, Tony Perkins' widow, declined to co-operate with Winecoff for this biography because she intended to write her own profile of her husband. Her sudden death in the September 11 attacks prevented that. As a result, Winecoff's is an unauthorized biography lacking the resources that really illuminate a life -- letters, photos, access to relatives and, I expect, certain friends.

Nonetheless, he has apparently read almost every word published about Perkins and tracked down an astonishing number of people who worked with him or knew him, even including former sex partners who may only have been anonymous tricks at the time and remain anonymous now.

At over 400 pages, there is too much information in this book. Lacking the access that might have gotten him closer to his subject, Winecoff includes details from the sets of every film Perkins was involved with, even those that weren't completed. There are numerous quotes from press interviews that were never more than fluff pieces and surely can't provide us with any sort of worthwhile insight into Perkins' thoughts or feelings.

What we're left with, as the subtitle suggests, is a mass of contradictions. Perkins seems to have been on some sort of stage almost all the time, increasingly so as the years passed. He was a very different person to different people, and the roles were too disparate to coalesce into facets of one personality.

A sad story, really; but one has to admire the fortitude and persistence of Perkins' struggle to make the pieces fit together and his determination to provide as best he could for his wife and children. ( )