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Certainly led a colorful life—as did those who came before him and after him. Anthony Perkins didn’t arrive out of nowhere; he came down a long, strange American line that runs straight through Massachusetts. His ancestor John Howland went overboard on the Mayflower and lived to tell it, spending that first winter of 1620 anchored in Provincetown Harbor before the colony pushed on into Plymouth and the Massachusetts settlements that would eventually center around Boston. Generations later, the arc bends back—not just to the Cape, but to Wellfleet—where Perkins would marry and build part of his life. Mayflower to Massachusetts… and back to the Outer Cape. The loop tightens.
He slipped into Hollywood sideways. A bit part in The Actress—as the Harvard suitor in Ruth Gordon’s autobiographical Years Ago—was the opening note. Then came teen-idol tremors, including a real 1950s pop hit (“Moon-Light Swim”), before the mask sealed: Psycho. Norman Bates didn’t just make him famous—it rewrote him. Around him, life kept expanding: marriage to Berry Berenson in Wellfleet, two sons—Osgood Perkins and Elvis Perkins—and a parallel existence moving through the Outer Cape’s off-map cultural circuitry.
That’s the part the archive can’t quite hold. Not the headlines, not the stills—but the lived life between them. The friendships, the rooms, the places like Shop Therapy, where the mythology dropped its guard and became something human. Perkins spent a lifetime negotiating identity—public, private, inherited, imposed. And maybe that’s the real story: not that he was Norman Bates—but that he was part of a much older American loop, one that begins at the edge of the continent… disappears into the city… and finds its way back to Wellfleet, where the land narrows and everything gets a little closer to the truth.
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