Margaret Wappler’s A Good Bad Boy is an enormously engaging biographical narrative of the life of Luke Perry, star of the TV series Hollywood 90210, a teen drama that ran from 1990 through 2000. The series achieved huge success and a fanatical cult following among American teenagers.
Wappler brings to her account of Perry’s life the shrewd insights of a veteran reporter of Pop culture and the craft of an accomplished novelist. The result is a carefully researched and empathetic portrait of a complex man who experiences the exhilarating rewards of television fame and subsequently the necessity of moving beyond those rewards in order to achieve a deeper realization of himself as actor and as human being. This is an archetypal American story, the discovery that fame and fortune are not enough, followed by the pursuit of new values, often tragic in the elevated since of that word. Think of Gatsby.
Put together the archetype of the American tragic hero and the search for the self in the essence of acting and you have the compelling arc of Perry’s narrative as Wappler shapes it with consummate skill: a meteoric rise to fame followed by a flat period devoid of major roles followed by a renewal of energy and the prospect of roles of deeper significance, alas cut short by death.
This is the point at which to introduce a second narrative, the story of Margaret, an autobiographical account of the descent and rise of the author from pre-teen anxiety and psychological disarray to fulfilling motherhood. This narrative is interleafed into the story of Perry. It would be hard to overemphasize the richness this story adds to Perry’s struggles, as does Perry’s story illuminate Margaret’s. Part of the richness is inherent in the intense suffering and depression of Margaret, devoted fan of Perry, as she struggles to overcome a dispiriting family milieu and a culture of superficial and often destructive values. But much of the richness comes from the ingenious placements of parts of the Margaret story beside the Perry narrative. The crowning juxtaposition comes late in the book with the side-by-side arrangement of birth and death, the birth of Margaret’s child and Perry’s death.
Further examination of the two narratives will reward us with interesting questions about their relationship. First, we recognize that the Margaret of her story is different from Margaret Wappler, author of A Good Bad Boy. Margaret has her own persona, and her story is told in the third rather than in the first person, to distance her from Margaret Wappler. Similarly, Perry has dramatic personas in his acting roles different from his biographical identity. A very important instance is Dylan McKay, the archetypal bad boy of Hollywood 90201. Are Margaret’s and Perry’s layered characters parallel? Yes, some of the time. Both must struggle against entrapment in toxic American teen culture—faddish garments and hair-dos, cliques, petty jealousies, adoration of wealth, sex, drugs. And again, by the end of the book both have in parallel achieved a new sense of self. But there are differences. Margaret in her coming up out of deep depression has an indispensable mentor, the benign and insightful psychiatrist, Dr. F.. Perry has no such mentor. Some of his many friends serve as important confidants, and perhaps together they fulfill the role of psychotherapist, but the reader will more likely see Perry escaping on his own from the role of Dylan McKay, teenage heartthrob. The dramatic difference, of course, is that Perry’s ascent as a serious actor is cut short by a fatal stroke. Margaret’s horizon, after her marriage and the birth of her son, stretches out before her.
Wappler has for this book artfully deployed a mixture of textures and styles. For Perry’s story we have an engaged but generally cool voice, expert, perceptive, often ironical, even tellingly aphoristic: Perry believed “the collective [unconscious] always moves toward doing the right thing.” As for emoting about the goodness of Perry’s character, which is surely real, Wappler leaves that to the numerous witnesses of his unfailing kindness. By striking contrast, the style of Margaret’s narrative is highly emotional, verging on hysteria in the early sections; later conveying an almost ecstatic gratitude for the gifts she has received in her thirties and forties, now settled if not placid.
Finally, not to be underestimated is a powerful tension that thrums constantly under the surface of A Good Bad Boy like the menacing base beat of a dark symphony. It is the Shadow book that haunts its host throughout and thrusts itself above the surface from time to time. The Shadow would like to engage directly and dramatically with the corrupting influences of American culture especially as they affect teenagers. It would like to lay bare the implications of Wappler’s dedication, “For all the lost teenagers, yet to be found.” One, but only one, of the corrupting influences is the aggressive capitalistic drive to commodify everything—art, religion, clothing, houses, human relationships, labor, forbidden substances, sexuality, human identities, the human body and its parts, from hair-dos down to painted toenails and the secreted parts between. This pervasive commodification is dramatized for Perry when he is mobbed by teenage fans at a department store, when he releases the anguished cry, “I am product!” The Shadow that haunts A Good Bad Boy is a narrative bristling with full-scale culture critique. For serious fun take a look at the dust jacket. What’s the message? Or messages? Perry with his famous brow scar, with one of his dreamy eyes, the other hidden in darkness, is looking at us through cleverly arranged fingers. Above his wrinkled brow rides the signature pompadour of slick black hair. His expression, what? A wicked invitation to join him in the make-believe world of Hollywood 90210 with its glitter and sex? Or is this the infamous gaze that men use to fixate their female marks? Or is this a warning: do not be lured by this poseur into a world of fatally unreal values? However it is to be interpreted, this is not the good boy. To this reader it seems a character from the Shadow book, which is maybe a dystopia so popular nowadays, and for good reason. The Shadow book tells us that what was once our cultural and national history now descends into a tawdry myth of endless wealth and pleasure, never mind the plight of the have-nots.
You who, perhaps like me, passed through the 90s mostly unscathed by popular culture, you need to read this book. You will find it a moving picture of its own time and in many ways a disturbing harbinger of ours.