Frank and Eleanor Perry: Together and Apart

August 21 was the birthday (and August 29 the death day) of Frank Perry (1930-1995); and August 26 is Women’s Equality Day, a suitable season for a little reflection on the filmmaker and his screenwriter wife Eleanor (Rosenfeld) Perry (1914-1981). I thought of echoing the format of their debut feature David and Lisa (1962) in the title to this post, but Frank and Eleanor sounds too much like the Roosevelts.

The Perry’s story has much in common with that of Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt, which was so diligently explored and recounted by Karina Longworth on You Must Remember This. A salient difference is that the Perry’s projects together, while attaining the highest critical plaudits, were not box office blockbusters. Indeed Frank’s biggest film (a decade after their breakup) was Mommie Dearest (1981), which couldn’t be less like the movies the couple had made together as a pair. Ironically, this famous (but highly enjoyable) turkey remains what Frank Perry is best known for (that, and being Katy Perry’s uncle), while just about all of his earlier, highly respected work gets the occasional play on TCM or the Criterion channel. What are you gonna do? I didn’t make this world!

Was Eleanor the brains of the outfit? There’s many, including her, who make that claim. Older than her husband by 15 years, she had been involved with movies since 1945, when a B movie called Dangerous Partners was adapted from Paper Chase, a novel she’d co-written with her husband Leo Bayer under the mutual pseudonym Oliver Weld Bayer. In the ’50s she penned some live television dramas, culminating in the 1958 Broadway production of the play Third Best Sport, which ran for two months. She and Bayer (who co-wrote the play) split shortly thereafter.

Persona much?

Eleanor married Perry in 1960. The son of a New York stockbroker, Perry had studied with Lee Strasberg, and had directed some TV documentaries as well as some theatre at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. In 1962 came their career-making, intimately small independent feature David and Lisa. The film is drawn from Eleanor’s investigation of psychiatric social work, in which she had a master’s degree. It starred then-unknown Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin as a couple of deeply disturbed (and exceptionally good looking) young adults who fall in love in a mental institution, with Howard Da Silva as their shrink. The film is very much of its own time, somewhat patronizing towards it characters, and full of outmoded Freudianism. But the performances are very good, and both the Perrys were nominated for Oscars, an extraordinary thing for such a tiny, outsider film. The film was extremely influential as well. I think of movies like Lillith (1964) with Warren Beattyand Jean Seberg, and Charly (1968) with Cliff Robertson and Claire Bloom as owing a lot to it.

Throughout the next decade, the Perrys made a series of what can only be called American art films, very much in tune with the kind of pictures that were being made in France and the U.K. during the period. This can only be characterized as astounding given that they were made in the Hollywood sausage factory. On the other hand, these movies didn’t cost much to make, they won (or were nominated for) major awards, and they made new stars out of unknown actors. Ladybug, Ladybug (1963) marked the screen debuts of William Daniels and Estelle Parsons; Last Summer (1969) had early performances by Richard Thomas, Barbara Hershey, Bruce Davidson, and Catherine Burns (who was nominated for an Oscar); Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) garnered an Oscar nom for newcomer Carrie Snodgrass, and was the first film for Frank Langella, and the third for Richard Benjamin.

The critical acclaim also allowed them to work with some bigger names. They did two Truman Capoteadaptations, a tv production of A Christmas Memory (1967) starring Geraldine Page, and the all-star Trilogy (1969), with Page, Martin Balsam, Mildred Natwick, and Maureen Stapleton. And of course, there was The Swimmer (1968) with Burt Lancaster, a favorite of mine, which I wrote about at length here, and from which the Perrys were fired and replaced with Sydney Pollack.

With hindsight, I think you can spy trouble brewing in The Diary of a Mad Housewife, in which the titular martyr is caught between two raging assholes. Neil Young fell for Carrie Snodgress after seeing the picture and even wrote a song about it. They literally became a couple as a result of the movie! Meanwhile, the Perrys split in 1971, an account of which was fictionalized in her 1979 novel Blue Pages, which talks about the struggles of women in Hollywood. Throughout her career, she’d essentially only gotten to get her movies made with men as Trojan Horses. As a woman, she found herself belittled and dismissed. After the breakup, she only had a couple more of screen projects, but they were notable. The TV movie The House Without a Christmas Tree (1972) with Lisa Lucas,Jason Robards, and Mildred Natwick aired annually through 1977. And she co-wrote The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973) for Burt Reynolds with Bill Norton. She died of cancer in 1981, two years after Blue Pages, and six months short of what surely would have been the great pleasure of guffawing at Mommie Dearest.

Meanwhile, Frank Perry sort of became Joe Hollywood. His first movie after Diary of a Mad Housewife, was the Pete Hamill-penned western Doc (1971), featuring Stacy Keach as Doc Holliday. It was almost like he had to prove his dick hadn’t been cut off by the previous movie. (It would be an interesting exercise, I think, to put it on a double bill with The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing). He then returned to something like his previous milieu by shooting Joan Didon’sPlay It As It Lays (1972), the Golden Globe nominated comeback film for Tuesday Weld. This was followed by the genuinely interesting and spooky Man on a Swing (1974) in which Joel Grey plays a guy who claims to be a clairvoyant, helping Cliff Robertson to solve a murder, but who may actually be either the murderer himself, or just a guy who wants attention. Rancho Deluxe (1975) is a fun and forgettable, very “New Hollywood” buddy picture starring Jeff Bridgesand Sam Waterston as a pair of hippie cattle rustlers.

In 1977 he married Barbara Goldsmith, then best known for penning the “Creative Environment” series of Hollywood magazine profiles. In 1980 she wrote Little Gloria…Happy at Last, which became a 1982 TV mini-series, and belongs very nicely in a category with Mommie Dearest. Surely, this was a man who was influenced by the women in his life! To go from a series of subtle psychological explorations to tawdry tabloid fodder that’s about as nuanced as a freight train. My but do the Joan Crawford fans hate this movie! As someone who was similarly ill-used by angry, drunken parents as a child, I find this film’s pure revenge motives delicious in the extreme, and after all it’s the daughter’ story, not the movie star’s. But it would be understated to call the characterization of Crawford in this movie one-sided. What is most surprising is that Perry and Faye Dunaway together would cook up a performance so unsubtle. They are sort of doing it in the style of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But maybe that was intentional.

Perry only directed a few films after that. Monsignor (1982) starred Christopher Reeve as a Priest sent to investigate corruption at the Vatican. Compromising Positions (1985) was a starring vehicle for Susan Sarandon, who plays a reporter investigating the revenge murder of a lecherous dentist. I genuinely enjoyed the flawed but original comedy Hello Again (1987) starring Shelley Long as a woman who returns from the dead, only to learn how inconvenient it is when somebody does that. It has holes you can drive a hearse through, and bombed with both critics and audiences, but I could see how there was potentially a great movie there, and I find the misstep sad. Christopher Reeve was quoting as saying Monsignor had been ruined in the editing, and I have the same instinct about Hello Again. Stuff is missing.

After the failure of Hello Again, Perry restricted himself to producing his next two films, the screen adaptation of Miss Firecracker (1989) with Holly Hunter, and the black comedy A Shock to the System (1990) with Michael Caine. In 1992 he divorced Goldsmith (or vice versa) and married his much younger ski instructor Virginia Brush Ford. That same year he made a documentary called On the Bridge about his experience with cancer — not Eleanor’s, his own. Karma? A curse from beyond the grave? Had they drunk the same contaminated groundwater? I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but if it were a story, I would commend the O. Henry twist.