If you're inclined to want to know who your father was and your father wasn't about to tell you, it's an infinite thing, right? You're always going t
If you’re inclined to want to know who your father was and your father wasn’t about to tell you, it’s an infinite thing, right? You’re always going to be reaching for something. I grew up with a very perceptible person who was very reclusive and he was very private. He was very turned inward and lonely, right? And he didn’t have a reflective surface for me. He didn’t have a father, and I think he was pulled pretty gaunt by the sort of the charade of “Tony Perkins.” [I was] trying to catch up to the thing, trying to get approval, trying to get the conversation … And I was just never really able to find it.
And yet, you must have really cared for him because you have spent so many years since trying to understand him. People who hate their parents just want to forget them.
Absolutely. When he did stick his head out of all of it, he was super entertaining—so intelligent, and wildly goofy in his sense of humor, and just such an intellectual. All of his close friends were the most intellectual people in the world: Stephen Sondheim, Mike Nichols, Orson Welles. These were his people. These are the people who really got my dad. I knew that even if I wasn’t getting a lot of it, what there was to get was great. He wasn’t a mean person. He wasn’t an abusive person, not by a long shot. He was just … unavailable.
It sounds like you sensed the pain in him too.
I think as kids, right, we sense everything, right? It just depends on how much we’re encouraged to ratify that suspicion. In my case, it was the opposite, right? It was like: “Anything you think you might understand about your dad, let’s just leave it off to the side.” There was never any conversation around it. Even when he was outed in the press as having AIDS and therefore, gay, the family position stayed the same. “No, he’s not. That’s a lie.”
Who said that to you?
This is my mom. “This is bad reporting. How dare they?” It was a weird place for all of us to be in, but a weird place for her to be in, for sure. Everybody knew it was true. She certainly knew that it was true. Everybody in Hollywood knew that it was true.
She just didn’t want you and your brother to know?
I think, as she saw it, it didn’t apply to us. It was sort of a complication that she could live with, but it didn’t really apply to us until it really applied to us.
So what “secret horror” do you think you might have inherited from him?
There’s an impulse in me to be secret. I wish I had some fascinating secrets that I was harboring. There’s a part of me that feels like that’s something you got to do, right? For me, the fictional character of all time is Darth Vader—because Darth Vader puts his hand out in the second movie and says, “I am your father.” And when that happened to me in the theater, I said, “Oh. Oh, I get it. He’s totally hidden. He’s totally regressed. He can’t be himself. He really wants to connect with this kid, but he can’t. This is really strenuous for him. Oh, destitute Darth Vader!”
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