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Berinthia 'Berry' Berenson
1948 ~ 2001
 

CBSNews.com 

http://www.cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,314579-412,00.shtml

48 Hours: And Then There Were 2

Two Travelers On A Flight That Changed The World
Young Men Lose A Vibrant Mother
Mother, Toddlers Lose A Family Man

NEW YORK, Oct. 12,2001
(CBS) “She was just this angel that landed on this planet for a short amount of time.”

That’s how actress-model Marisa Berenson describes her sister 53-year-old Berry Berenson Perkins.

A photographer and the wife of the late actor Anthony Perkins, Perkins was seated in row 19, seat A, on Flight 11, traveling from her Cape Cod home to see her sons in Los Angeles.

“I hope she didn’t suffer,” Berenson tells 48 Hours correspondent Troy Roberts, alluding to the crash of that flight into Tower One of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. “It’s hard to take in.”

“We laughed so much about things. We had so much fun together. We loved each other. I’m gonna miss the physical contact of it all…it’s hard.”

Also on that flight was 33-year-old venture capitalist David Retick of Needham, Mass. He was in the second row, across the aisle from two of the hijackers.

“ We spoke right before he boarded the plane and it was just, ‘Sorry I’ll miss you-‘ I think I said I love you at the end, because we usually did,” says David’s wife, Susan

“But I remember him saying ‘Gotta go, we’re boarding.’ I wish ,you know, like in the movies when people have premonitions of bad feelings like “Don’t get on that plane.’ What I would give for having had that premonition.”

Perkins and Retick were among the 76 innocent passengers aboard a flight that would change the world.

“We were kind of flying in the same skies together, which was so strange,” says Berenson, who was flying that same morning from Paris to New York. She was unaware of her sister’s travel plans.

“We couldn’t land in New York and so we were rerouted to St. John, Newfoundland, “ she recalls. “I ended up in a Navy base and I was able to call my daughter. And then that’s when she told me over the phone what had happened.”

Susan Retick got a call at home while caring for her 2-year-old daughter, Molly, and Ben, who is 4.

“One of the worst things in the beginning is when they keep asking for their dad,” she says of the children’s reactions. “But when they stop asking… It’s going to hurt ten times more when they stop asking for him.”

The couple starting dating in college. “Senior year, I had asked him out on a date, ” Retick says. They were married six years after they met.

“He loved his family and was a warm , caring person, so I got the entire package,” she says.

The Reticks’ third child is due next month and Susan Retick expects that will be “a hard day.”

People thought I was crazy, but I always said how much I loved labor. Not that I loved the pain of it. But to me, there’s absolutely nothing more special than bringing a baby into this world and looking over and seeing Dave - the look, the connection, that we produced this amazing person.”

David Retick’s office hasn’t been touched since the day he was killed, an eerie reminder of all that was lost that morning.

In Paris last week, Berry Berenson Perkins was remembered by family members and friends from around the world. The sisters were born into wealth and privilege. Their grandmother was designer Elsa Schiaparelli and their father was a U.S. iplomat.

Together, they were a fascinating sister act: Marissa a top model and actress and Berry a fashion photographer who occasionally worked in films.

But the role Berry most enjoyed was that of wife and mother to her two boys. When Tony Perkins died of AIDS in 1992, Berry was at his side, having nursed her husband through the last years of his life.

“She was very spiritual,” says actor-director Richard Benjamin, a long-time friend. “I think she felt that it was not right to live the day that you were in. Somehow with that terrible tragedy she was able to pull herself together for the boys.”

The boys are now men. Twenty-five-year-old Elvis is a musician and 27-year-old Osgood is an actor.

“They’re dealing with it in their own way,” Berenson says of them. “It’s devastating, obviously. How can you deal with losing your father and then your mother in such circumstances?”

As a goodwill ambassador for the European arm of the United Nations, Berenson has for years helped promote tolerance and peace around the world. Her sister’s death has made this mission personal.

“I have hope and tremendous faith,” she says. “I think that’s what gets you through life… through tragedies is when you have faith.”


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Guardian Unlimited
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Guardian/0,4029,551684,00.html
 
 
Berry Berenson

Berinthia 'Berry' Berenson

Accomplished fashion photographer and actor who stood by her husband Anthony Perkins through his Aids crisis

Special report: terrorism in the US

Amanda Hopkinson
Friday September 14, 2001
The Guardian

Berry Berenson, aged 53, who was a passenger on the hijacked American Airlines flight 11 which crashed into the World Trade Centre, was a fashion photographer and accomplished Hollywood film actor. She was, however, known as much for her personal profile, having been married to Anthony Perkins for nearly 20 years until his death from Aids in 1992. A granddaughter of the fabled Italian couturier Elsa Schiaperelli, known for the promotion of shocking pink as a fashion shade, Berry showed she could lead a similarly colourful existence.

Born in New York, she was mostly educated in Europe - her father was a diplomat whose great uncle was the art historian Bernard Berenson. Berry inherited her father's gift for languages.

Her ambivalent career was partly a product of these aristocratic antecedents and connections. Through her better-known sister, the actress Marisa (Death In Venice, Cabaret and Barry Lyndon), she came to photograph a roll-call of Hollywood stars: Tuesday Weld, Ray Brock, Pilar Crespi, Candice Bergen and more. The sisters were raised as socialites who entertained, and were entertained by, both the cream and the froth of society.

One of this charmed circle, Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine - and sometime fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar - set her up as a fashion photographer. She began to work for both magazines. Without ever straying too far outside the conventions of the medium, she enjoyed "playing" with her models - several of whom she knew anyway - in setting up a shot.

This career path brought the sisters together to create Dressing Up, for which Berry took the portraits and Marisa provided the text - and modelled some of the outfits. Her most recent publication was a working biography of the couturier, Halston.

In 1973, she married the actor Tony Perkins. She was three months pregnant, a condition that prompted her mother, the impressively titled Marquesa Gogo Berenson di Cacciapooti, to call her a "degenerate". Despite Perkins's homosexuality, Berry remained his wife, and cared for him in the last two years of his life.

During their marriage, she had carved out an alternative career path as an actor. In between cover shoots for Life magazine, she was shooting films. Particularly after 1978, when both her sons were well beyond babyhood, she played major or minor roles in such films as Remember My Name (1978); Winter Kills (1979), a political melodrama with a cast that included Perkins, John Huston and Elizabeth Taylor; Cat People (1982), a horror mystery; and in the 1980 TV series, Scruples.

Many of these roles had a sinister undertow. In Alan Rudolph's Remember My Name, for example, Perkins and Berenson co-starred as a suburban couple whose lives gradually come apart following an apparently random act of vandalism.

While Perkins summed up his personal tragedy, après Flaubert, with: "Face it gang, I am Norman Bates," Berry Berenson has been given a very different memorial. In the wake of the horror of her death, her spokeswoman Susan Patricola commented: "She was one of the loveliest, greatest people on the earth, full of life." At the time of her death, Berenson was returning home to Los Angeles after holidaying on Cape Cod. She is survived by her two sons by Anthony Perkins: Osgood, aged 27, and Elvis Perkins, aged 25.

Ronald Bergan writes: During therapy, for what he believed would "cure" his homosexuality, Anthony Perkins was asked what sort of woman attracted him. He flipped through a copy of Vogue until he pointed to a spread on Berry Berenson. Coincidentally, Berenson claimed: "When I was 12, I fell in love with Anthony Perkins in Phaedra." Ten years later, in 1972, Berry visited her screen idol at the New York townhouse he shared with the dancer Grover Dale, for Andy Warhol's magazine, Interview. "I thought she was cute and pretty but a little frantic," Perkins recalled. Soon after, they started to go out together.

In 1973, She and Tony got married. An ex-boyfriend of Perkins, photographer Chris Markos, said: "The funny thing is that Berry and I looked similar - we both had short fair hair and similar features. This was noticed by the Andy Warhol crowd, who joked that he substituted Berry for me."

However, there is no doubt that Perkins was both sexually attracted to and in love with Berenson. There was also agreement among their circle of friends that she either did not know about his sexual adventures before and after their marriage, or that she preferred not to know, or, in fact, care.

Then, in 1990, Perkins was tested positive for HIV. He decided that he wanted the knowledge kept secret even from their intimates, which heaped a tremendous burden on Berenson. When Perkins got Aids, she finally decided to tell a few of their closest friends - "to share this grief with us". On September 2 1992, Perkins died with Berenson clutching her husband's hand. "We had a very satisfying life together. It was a wonderful love affair. If anything else was happening, I certainly didn't know about it, and I don't think he intended to hurt me in any way."


Berinthia 'Berry' Berenson, photographer and actor, born 1948; died September 11 2001

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THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=4877

Farewell to Berry Berenson, Who Was In Fact, Beautiful

by Simon Doonan

Dress up, not down. Pull yourself together every day like the proud, snappy New Yorker that you are. It’s not disrespectful: A crisper and more optimistic you will inspire positive thoughts in others. Remember that the Navy Seals, no matter how dire things get, shave every day and polish their boots. And if it’s not too chilly, do what some cheeky New York chicks did last week: throw on a bikini and cheer on the relief workers at the West Side Highway.

Above all, shop! Our Mayor told you to shop, and by God, I’m telling you to shop. Make your contribution to the Twin Towers Fund first, then go buy yourself a brave, flamboyant chapeau and wear it with pride. There is nothing superficial about shopping: It’s life-affirming, it keeps the economy buoyant and it just might make you a tad more beautiful.

Berinthia Berenson, the well-known photographer and human being who died on American Airlines Flight 11 when it hit the World Trade Center, was very beautiful. In fact, you could describe her as one of "The Beautiful People"; it’s a stupid, superficial term, but in her case it was true, both in a profound sense and in the more commonly understood one. The tomboy photographer and sister of model and actress Marisa Berenson, granddaughter of couturier Elsa Schiaparelli and widow of the late Anthony Perkins (yes, she married Norman Bates in 1973), Berry had the beauty and provenance to propel her, unwittingly, into Beautiful People–dom. She was, without ever intending to be, something of a founding member.

The Beautiful People started off as a spontaneous core group of naughty Euro-funsters: the de la Falaises, the von Furstenbergs, Roger Vadim, Gunther Sachs, Amanda Lear, Fernando Sanchez, Joan Buck, Anjelica Huston, Manolo Blahnik, etc., etc.—and, of course, Marisa and Berry. These "B.P.’s," as the media quickly dubbed them, wore caftans, oozed international grooviness and often had weird names. Don’t you sometimes wish your name was Ricky Von Opel or Florinda Bolkan?

It wasn’t long before the B.P.’s were lumped in with the best-dressed-list bourgeoisie. A 1968 cover of Nova magazine shows a certain Principessa Pignatelli lying on a fur bedspread surrounded by her wigs and falls: "Princess Pignatelli plucks each hair off her legs with tweezers," screams the headline. What had originally been about bohemian fun had now become more about jewelry, dieting and Valentino couture. By the early 70’s, real B.P.’s like Berry had already started to distance themselves from the whole cringe-making concept: In the recently published memos of Diana Vreeland (in the Sept. 17 issue of The New Yorker), the Vogue editor gave advice on how to recruit (she names Baby Jane Holzer, Didi Ryan and Valerian Rybar) for a B.P.-themed feature: "Lots of beautiful people do not want to join ‘The Beautiful People’ …. Therefore, when asking anyone to pose, I suggest you do not mention that—but only flatter them into having their picture taken in their beautiful printed coat …. "

The phrase "The Beautiful People" was inching its way into common parlance, and various B.P.’s started cashing in: Principessa Pignatelli, a.k.a. Luciana Avedon, finally bored with all that leg-tweezing, wrote The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book and The Beautiful People’s Diet Book, the latter found by a jubilant moi in a Shelter Island yard sale last year for 25 cents. Some of the original B.P.’s managed to exploit their B.P.-dom without losing cred: Caterine Milinaire (and Carol Troy) wrote Cheap Chic, the best shopping and style book of all time; Bianca snagged Mick; Marisa Berenson lensed (love that verb!) movies with Kubrick, Visconti and Fosse; and Berry became the Roxanne Lowit of her era. She shot fashion shows and events, mostly for Vogue and Interview; she even shot a Time cover of Halston-clad Cybill Sheperd. "She had the best archive—1968 to ’75-ish," says Steven Bluttal, whose upcoming book, Halston (Phaidon, $39.95), contains some 60 of Berry’s photographs. In the course of preparing his book, Mr. Bluttal was aided, abetted and inspired by Berry. "She didn’t know me from Adam. I slept at her house. She handed me sheaves of negatives, including tons of early Halston runway stuff. She was so trusting."

Raising her two kids, Osgood and Elvis, was Berry’s other career. I met Berry during her 1980’s L.A.-mom period and found her delightfully wacky and down-to-earth. West Coast Condé Nast editor Paul Fortune (House & Garden) recalls: "You would go to dinner at her house. It would be Sophia Loren and Berry’s gardener—whatever was fun and real." She took a stab at acting (Cat People, Remember My Name). "She was curious," said Mr. Fortune, "but being in the spotlight wasn’t her bag. She was a nurturing Hollywood earth mother." In the 1980’s, her compassion toward our mutual friends during the early days of the AIDS epidemic was tested over and over again. In 1992, her own husband, Anthony Perkins, succumbed to the disease after she’d nursed him for two years.

On Sept. 15, I spoke to her old friend, photographer Paul Jasmin, who was in the midst of helping organize her Los Angeles memorial. He was anxiously awaiting the arrival of Berry’s sister Marisa, who had been stranded in Newfoundland since her flight from Europe on Sept. 11 was diverted. Mr. Jasmin was on his way to confer with Elvis, 25, a musician, and Osgood, 27, an actor currently appearing in Legally Blonde. "Elvis is going to play," said Mr. Jasmin. "The boys want to keep it small, which is impossible. Their mom was such a beacon. People who met her once feel like she was their best friend."

Since I found Luciana Avedon’s bitchy B.P. diet book in that yard sale last year, I have been hypothesizing about whatever happened to the Beautiful People. Last week I got the answer. The bravery and chutzpah demonstrated by New Yorkers was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The Beautiful People are back, and this time, like Berry, they are real.

Send your avant-shopping check to the Twin Towers Fund (established by Mayor Giuliani to aid those most directly affected), P.O. Box 26999, General Post Office, New York, N.Y. 10087-6999.

COPYRIGHT © 2000
THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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