Elizabeth Perkins on luck, sexism and Big’s love scene: ‘It would not be acceptable today’
Veering from horror to joy and back again, Elizabeth Perkins is contemplating what it would be like if her adult children moved back home. “The thing is, you miss them so much, then they’ll come back for a holiday and within a week there’s dirty dishes everywhere, there’s wet towels on the floor, they’ve eaten all the food. After a couple of weeks, you’re like: ‘Will they ever leave?’”
This is the timely theme of Perkins’ show The Moodys, the first season of which, in 2019, saw three grownup children return home to Chicago for Christmas. Perkins plays Ann Moody, their mother; Denis Leary plays her husband. In the new season, all three children are living at the family home, with predictably messy consequences. “It really explored that dichotomy of: you love them to death, but, man, they get on your nerves,” says Perkins.
It is a dynamic familiar to many families. Perkins’ daughter and three stepsons – all in their 20s – have not returned home, but lots of her friends’ kids have, due to the pandemic. “It’s interesting, because, in my generation, you were considered a loser if you moved back in with your parents,” says Perkins, 60. “But things have changed. When I look at how hard my kids have to work to earn a living compared with when I was their age, it’s much harder for them.” The stigma of moving back home, she says, “is outdated”. There is a perfectly timed pause. “But it still doesn’t help the parents when the kids move back.”
For the past 15 years, Perkins’ most interesting work has been on television – she was the nightmare neighbour Celia Hodes in Weeds, the boozy busybody Jackie O’Neill in Sharp Objects and a mother trying to prove her son’s innocence in Truth Be Told. These are not roles with which the film industry is awash, “particularly for women my age”, she says. “They don’t necessarily see you as a box office draw.” There are exceptions – she is impressed by the work actors such as Viola Davis, 55, and Frances McDormand, 63, are doing. She says of the film industry: “It would be nice if they got on that bandwagon, but it is what it is.”
Perkins’ film career peaked in the 80s and 90s – her big break was as Tom Hanks’ girlfriend in Big in 1988. In the 90s, she featured in intelligent, critically acclaimed films (Barry Levinson’s Avalon) and more obviously commercial projects (she played Wilma in The Flintstones and starred in a remake of Miracle on 34th Street).
But television is where the meaty projects are, even if she still finds herself rolling her eyes at scripts that come in with underwritten parts for older women. “But I also think that people hire me based on what they know I’ll bring – I can read something and say: ‘I can make this into something interesting,’” she says. “I don’t base my interest on the size of the role, which I think some actors do. If it’s an interesting character, like with Sharp Objects, that’s more interesting to me than: ‘Am I the lead?’” With her background in ensemble theatre, you get the sense that Perkins just loves being around other actors, rather than being the star; the result, perhaps, is that she is underrated, even if she is a regular scenestealer in supporting roles.
When Perkins made her debut in the Brat Pack movie About Last Night, she was barely three years out of drama college. The film, with Rob Lowe, Demi Moore and Jim Belushi, “set me on my way. I know a lot of really talented actors who never had that kind of break and I was just incredibly lucky to be there and be able to pull that off.”
This seems typically self-effacing. Although we are separated by a phone line, her voice is low and warm and there are small but telling details – she asks questions about my life; she has been with the same agency all her career – that hint at a grounded actor not driven by ego. She says there is a point at which “you only want to work with people you like – that you admire as people and what they stand for. I turn down a lot of work because I don’t want to be around any divas; I don’t want people who yell and scream.”
Her character in The Moodys, Ann, has retrained as a psychologist after years raising her children – she is partly informed by Perkins’ mother, who became a counsellor when Perkins, the youngest of three daughters, left home. “It really changed her perspective on the world,” says Perkins. “It boosted her self-esteem: she finally had something that was all hers, that was not based around the home and the kids. She just blossomed as a woman in her 50s.”
Perkins’ childhood sounds like an improbable screenplay pitch. She was born in New York, but when her parents divorced and her mother remarried, Perkins moved with her to live on her maternal grandfather’s farm on the border of Vermont and Massachusetts. “It was like: ‘We’re going to go be hippies now and have a garden.’ We were completely ill-prepared,” she says with a laugh. “I think I coped the same way everybody else in the family did – shock and awe, then the realisation that we were going to have to plough our own road. It was a learning curve, but it definitely made me stronger and it turned me on to a love of nature. We had cows and chickens and I learned how to work the land.”
Her new stepfather came, too – along with his eight children. If swapping the streets of Queens for a 243hectare (600-acre) farm in the middle of nowhere was a shock, she was also suddenly one of 11 children. “When my sisters and I look back on that, we’re like: ‘Wow, what were you thinking?’ Like: ‘Oh, I met this wonderful guy. He has eight children.’ I mean, I married a man who had three children, and that’s as far as you really want to go.”
There were so many of them that two pairs even had the same names – there was a big Susan and a little Susan, and a big Betsy and a little Betsy (that was Perkins). “It was like living in a commune,” she says. Later, when she met her husband, Julio Macat, a cinematographer, “the idea that he had children and I could have a big family was comforting to me. I found the idea of having all these people in the house very familiar.”
She says she “just kind of fell into” acting, discovering plays at primary school. “Everybody was being creative and making costumes and jumping around – I was a very hyperactive kid, always on the move, running somewhere, climbing a tree, and it just looked like fun.” At 17, Perkins moved to Chicago to take up a place at the prestigious Goodman School of Drama (now the Theatre School at DePaul University). She became part of the city’s Steppenwolf theatre – the groundbreaking company that counted John Malkovich and Laurie Metcalf among its first members – and was married to one of its founders, Terry Kinney, for half of the 80s.
What was it like being part of that crowd? “They were just creating some of the most electric theatre that we’d ever seen,” she says. Being with them, she felt “elated all the time. We all played softball together, went out to restaurants together, and bars … it was just this really tight group of people.”
Being strong-willed and down-toearth – qualities forged, she thinks, in her large family and then in this theatre environment – protected Perkins as a young woman entering Hollywood in the 80s. “There were no safety nets, no HR. It was just: you’re in this system and it’s overwhelming.” Did she experience sexism? “Of course – we all did.” She remembers going to meetings with producers and directors “where they would just flat-out say: ‘Yeah, you’re just not sexy enough.’ Today, that would just not be something that would come out of anyone’s mouth.”
That is one effect of the #MeToo movement and the reckoning the film and TV business has had since the conviction of Harvey Weinstein. “It has changed the industry, but there’s a lot of work still to be done,” says Perkins. “I don’t think change happens quickly, and inclusivity, diversity and equality are always going to be something you have to fight for. I’m proud to speak up when I can, because we do have the power to change if enough people speak up. That’s important to me as a woman who has been in this business for 35 years, to defend and speak out if I see injustice or …” She pauses. “For people who don’t have a voice of their own.”
On a march against sexual harassment in 2017, Perkins held a sign bearing the name of the actor James Woods. Woods had been previously accused by the actor Amber Tamblyn of trying to pick her up when she was 16 (on Twitter, Woods dismissed the allegation as “a lie”). At the time of the march, Perkins did not comment further – and she does not want to now. “I think it speaks for itself. I speak out, like I said, for those who can’t speak for themselves, and for those people who feel they don’t have a voice.”
Given how switched-on Perkins is, it seems like the right moment to ask how she feels about Big. The film, in which a boy makes a wish on a Zoltar funfair machine and wakes up the next morning as an adult, is brilliant and beloved – and also weird and wrong. If, like me, you grew up watching it over and over again, you loved it for the possibility that adulthood would
contain apartments with trampolines and Pepsi machines; now, you watch it and think: there is Susan (Perkins’ character), a thirtysomething executive, about to have sex with Josh (Hanks), who is really a 13-year-old boy.
“Oh, I know. I’ve been called a paedophile,” she says with a chuckle. Then her voice becomes more serious. “You know, I get it. The only thing I can say is it was a different time. It was the 80s; it was not viewed through that lens and I get that it is being viewed through that lens now.” It wouldn’t be made today in the same way, would it? “I don’t think that scene …” She is referring to the bedroom encounter in which Josh puts his hand on Susan’s breast and it is implied that they are about to have sex. It wouldn’t happen now, she says.
Were there any concerns at the time? “If you look at it in the movie, it was sort of used as a joke. Here he is the next morning, the elevator door opens and he bounces out like: ‘Wow, I just had my first sexual experience.’” He was – properly, this time, it implied – now a man. “It was a setup for a joke that today would not be acceptable.”
Poor Susan – she could not look more horrified when Josh turns back into his 13-year-old self. She waves him off to his mother with a look approaching maternal affection; you or I might consider handing ourselves in to the police, or at least block-booking therapy. “Oh, we had several different takes,” she says. “We had me being horrified, me being scared. There are a lot of different ways that we can go, but I think Penny [Marshall, the director] chose very carefully – that there is a lot of admiration between Susan and Josh, and ultimately a great friendship.”
When you have worked for more than three decades, it is inevitable that earlier work will be reappraised with different standards (and Big’s creepy love angle is hardly Perkins’ fault). She seems to have been barely out of work since then. “The fact that I’m at this age and I’m still able to work with somebody like Denis Leary, whom I really respect – I feel like I couldn’t ask for a better life,” she says. When she talks about her dogs, her husband (“I’m in a long-term marriage with a man I adore”) and her kids, she sounds completely grateful for the fortune of it all – as if Zoltar himself could not have granted any more.
It was on her first film that Lowe, her co-star, observed that Perkins had been “born under a lucky star”. “That’s how I feel,” she says. “I think I was 24 years old, and I’ve always held on to that.”
Season two of The Moodys is broadcast in the US on Fox on Thursday nights
Producers and directors would flatout say: ‘Yeah, you’re just not sexy enough’
background vocals for the major pop and rock acts of the past five decades. For many viewers, the film helped put a name to the pealing, cracking voice that bursts through Gimme Shelter, briefly pushing aside Mick Jagger. It led to an invite to contribute to Coldplay’s 2015 album A Head Full of Dreams; Clayton recorded her vocals a mere week after leaving the hospital.
Coldplay’s Chris Martin returned the favour when Clayton returned to the studio. Working with her longtime friend, the famed producer Lou Adler, she slowly put together her new album, Beautiful Scars, a collection of throwback R&B and modern gospel that includes the Martin-penned Love Is a Mighty River and the defiant title track written by Diane Warren, the stellar pop songwriter known for power ballads recorded by LeAnn Rimes, Aerosmith and more. “It was the closest recording situation that I’ve ever been in that was totally pure love,” Clayton says. “It was very spiritual. It’s like you’re on another sphere.”
The devotional tone of Beautiful Scars brings Clayton full circle from where she started singing: at the New Zion Baptist church in New Orleans. From as early as the age of six, she was a star of the church choir, earning the nickname Little Haley for her mimicry of Mahalia Jackson, the pre-eminent gospel singer of the time. Jackson, a friend of Clayton’s minister father, would frequent the parish when she visited New Orleans. “I would always find my way to nestle up right up under Mahalia wherever she was sitting,” says Clayton. “I would lean up against her and take a little nap because I would have been up since seven o’clock that morning.”
Clayton’s career got underway after her family moved to Los Angeles. She fell in with a group of other vocalists and with them landed her first recording session in 1962 at the age of 14, backing the pop star Bobby Darin. From the first take, he was blown away by the volume and power of Clayton’s voice and immediately wanted to sign her to a contract. The only hurdle was getting permission from Clayton’s mother. “She said: ‘OK, these are the rules. When you pick her up from school, she has to take a nap so that she can be refreshed. And then you have to correct her homework.’ So here’s poor Bobby Darin correcting homework.”
While her work with Darin didn’t lead to the pop success that they had hoped, it helped usher Clayton to her next big gig: joining the touring band for the R&B superstar Ray Charles. Her family friend, the keyboardist and future Beatles collaborator Billy Preston, had already landed the job playing organ in the group and hurried Clayton in for a rehearsal. She walked out with a contract for her parents to sign. “‘She will come back here the way she left,’” Clayton remembers her mother telling Charles. “‘If she doesn’t, we’re gonna have a problem.’” What she did return home with was Curtis Amy, Charles’s musical director and Clayton’s future husband. They were married for 32 years before his death in 2002.
It was Amy who took the call from the producer Jack Nitzsche, ringing late one night in 1969 and hoping that Clayton would sing on a track being recorded by the Rolling Stones. Still in her pyjamas, hair in rollers and four months pregnant, she arrived at Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood minutes later, cementing her place in rock history with her ferocious “it’s just a shot away” vocal line on Gimme Shelter. “I called Curtis: ‘These boys want me to sing about rape and murder.’ I wanted them to hear me, talking real loud to my husband on the phone. But we got the gist – that it was part of the song and not something just flying out of the sky. I was tired, it was cold and my voice cracked. We listened back and they said: ‘Oh that’s bloody fabulous. Can you do it again?’”
The day after the session with the Stones, Clayton suffered a miscarriage. She attributes it to the strain she put on her body pushing the heavy studio doors and reaching to hit the vocal peaks. “We lost a little girl. It took me years and years and years to get over that. You had all this success with Gimme Shelter and you had the heartbreak with this song.” Although she recorded her own version of the song for her 1970 studio album (itself entitled Gimme Shelter), it took her a long time to listen to the Stones’ song because she so closely associated it with losing her child. “It left a dark taste in my mouth. It was a rough, rough time.”
During the 1970s, Clayton continued to amass credits as a backing vocalist: Ringo Starr’s Oh My My, Carole King’s Smackwater Jack and Joe Cocker’s Feeling Alright. She also joined her friend and fellow singer Clydie King on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s controversial Southern rock anthem Sweet Home Alabama. Adding fuel to her impassioned performance was Clayton’s familiarity with the tune that song was written as a response to: Neil Young’s Southern Man. Moved by its fiery anti-racist lyrics, she had recorded a cover of Young’s song for her selftitled solo album – three years before landing in the studio with Lynyrd Skynyrd.
It took some convincing, as when Clayton heard the title of the song, her thoughts immediately went to the racially motivated church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young girls in 1963. It was her husband who persuaded her. “He said: ‘Why don’t you protest with this music? Sing it with everything that’s in you. Sing it as if you’re saying, ‘I got your Alabama right here.’ We went, singing through our teeth, not wanting to be there. And that was our protest.”
Through it all, Adler – or as she calls him “Uncle Lou” – remained her biggest champion. He signed Clayton to his own label and produced two of her solo albums; Adler was also responsible for Clayton performing the Acid Queen as part of an all-star orchestral version of the Who’s Tommy, performed at London’s Rainbow Theatre in 1972. Sporting, as she puts it, “an afro as big as the stage”, she chided her co-stars as they took turns sliding down the decorative mushrooms on stage. “Every other song, Rod Stewart would look at me and go: ‘Why are you taking everything so bloody serious?’ I leaned over and I told him: ‘I am serious! Don’t you understand there are marks we have to hit and things we have to do? I have to concentrate on what I’m doing. Leave me alone.’”
Clayton’s voice, as it is when she is recounting most anecdotes from her life, is filled with warmth and a hint of wonder, punctuated with a boisterous laugh. That carries through to talking about the present day. Her life in lockdown has been peaceful: she listens to Brahms or Tchaikovsky in the mornings, meditates and practises walking with her prosthetic legs. She is also coaching her granddaughter, a talented singer in her own right who makes an appearance on Beautiful Scars.
What never comes across during our conversation is any sense of despair about the accident or its aftermath. When Clayton returned home after her hospital stay, she quickly settled into a new routine of mental and physical rehabilitation with the help of her family and her doctors. “I started working really hard – but not too hard – on getting myself back to myself.”
Returning to some semblance of normality after enduring such trauma is no small accomplishment. I tell her I don’t know that I could have handled it, and I’m not alone, apparently. “I have friends who’ve told me: ‘Girl, if it were me, they would have had to put dirt on me – God knew who to put this on because I couldn’t bear it. You’re a walking, talking miracle.’ And I really, truly believe that, because I refuse to give in and I refuse to give up.”
• Beautiful Scars is released 9 April on Motown Gospel.