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(1926–1991). American actor and writer.
Wrote: The Other
(based on his novel) (Robert Mulligan 1972).
Other films based on his works: The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (tv movie) (Leo Penn 1978); Fedora (Billy Wilder 1978).
Consider first that Tryon graduated from Yale University
with a B.A. in Fine Arts, so he was undoubtedly an intelligent fellow. By some
reports, he was also a deeply closeted gay man—a reasonable surmise, in any
event, about a handsome Hollywood actor who never married. We can begin to
understand, then, some of the inner torments he might have felt when he emerged
in the 1950s as a popular male ingenue, always having to pretend to be stupid,
always having to pretend to be straight. Perhaps an electric thrill ran through
his body when he first read the script for I
Married a Monster from Outer Space, depicting a blandly agreeable
and apparently normal young man who marries a beautiful woman while hiding a
terrible secret from her. In the film, of course, the terrible secret was that
the man was really a loathsome alien in disguise, but Tryon was bright enough
to see the story's relevance to the terrible secret that many young men in the
repressed 1950s were actually hiding—a sexual desire that dare not speak its
name—and he gave an edgy, unnerving performance as the monster pretending to
be, almost wanting to be, but ultimately unable to be a genuine husband to his
lovely bride. With a little more polish, and a much more dignified title, I Married a Monster from Outer Space might
today be regarded as a science fiction classic, and it certainly qualifies as
the high point of Tryon's acting career.
In a lesser science fiction film, the Walt Disney comedy Moon Pilot, Tryon portrayed an astronaut
preparing to fly to the Moon who is secretly visited by a seductive alien woman—once again a man with something to hide. Saddled with a lackluster script,
and lamentably beset by the company of Tommy Kirk and a chimpanzee, Tryon can
nevertheless be observed actually thinking
about what he is doing, almost as if he might, through sheer will power alone,
transform this dreary travesty into a meaningful statement about the need for
men to escape from manipulative women, blustering bureaucrats, and inane
drudgery in order to achieve a new sense of freedom and dignity. But it wasn't
going to happen in a Walt Disney film.
And so, after the equally unsatisfactory experience of
starring in The Cardinal (1963)
and a few more years of undistinguished labor, Tryon gave up acting and turned
to writing. Although other actors have produced novels, none of them have
abandoned their former avocations as firmly as Tryon or garnered as much
critical acclaim for their efforts. While his first novel, The Other, had no overt connection to the
film world, it introduced what would become Tryon's most evocative theme: the
deadening and damaging effects of play-acting, on both the performers and the
people around them. Here, a disturbed little boy pretends that his dead twin
brother is still alive, using his persona as a cover for his own evil acts,
with the story narrated by the boy's older self, living in an asylum. Tryon
went on to provide an effective script for the film version, ingeniously
withholding the information that the brother is dead and keeping viewers
involved in its subdued story.
Tryon followed The Other
with an inferior horror novel, Harvest Home,
which became without his participation the basis for an inferior horror movie, The Dark Secret of Harvest Home. He then
looked back at his former profession in two volumes of interwoven stories, Crowned Heads and All That Glitters, depicting various
Hollywood stars stifled and destroyed by their own onscreen and offscreen
performances. One story in Crowned Heads
inspired the little-seen film Fedora,
doomed because director Billy Wilder could not bring the proper ambience of
horror to the story of a young woman forced to spend her life pretending to be her
own mother, while her mother in turn pretends to be an elderly friend.
Tryon's final years cannot have been happy ones: the man
reputed to be his longtime companion died of AIDS in 1987, and while the
official cause of Tryon's death in 1991 was cancer, one cannot help suspecting
that he had also been ravaged by the disease that killed his friend. The fact
that this was not announced is hardly surprising: since Tryon had long ago
decided that he did not wish to emulate Rock Hudson, the matinee idol, he surely
would have had no desire to emulate Rock Hudson, the internationally celebrated
martyr.
Thus, if we are driven to impose a pattern on his last
decades, it would be that Tryon, having resolved to stop performing at all
costs, yet still unwilling to reveal his true self, felt obliged to make
himself invisible; so he declined to write more of the horror stories that had
made him popular, rarely granted interviews, and did little to promote or
market his later novels, all of which scrupulously steered clear of anything
remotely autobiographical. Like an old soldier wishing to fade away after years
of private wars, Tryon seemingly craved the obscurity denied to both Hollywood
legends and best-selling novelists; perhaps he died desperately longing to be forgotten.
But those of us who have observed, in I
Married a Monster from Outer Space, one of the most memorable scenes
in the history of science fiction film—the moment when a flash of lightning
during a storm reveals to his new wife that Tryon is not what he appears to be—may feel compelled to keep examining the strange career of Thomas Tryon,
looking for other moments when lightning flashes and we might briefly see the
man behind the mask.
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