A GOOD BAD BOY

A devoted fan honors a famed actor.

Wappler pays homage to actor Luke Perry (1966-2019), who played the role of Dylan McKay in Beverly Hills, 90210. Melding biography and memoir, she interweaves a recounting of Perry’s life and career with the events of her own life, including her enthrallment with the show that made Perry famous. For the young author, Dylan was “the platonic ideal of the sensitive man hiding his wounds behind a shield of cool.” Perry almost didn’t get the role. He had acted only in a few soap operas, and his audition didn’t wow Fox executives, but producer Aaron Spelling believed in him so much that he offered to pay his salary out of his own pocket. Spelling turned out to be right; Perry was an instant heartthrob. The show debuted in the fall of 1990, up against Cheers. By 1992, 69% of American teenage girls watched it; the next year, it expanded to 30 countries. In 2001, though, rebelling at being typecast, Perry joined the cast of Oz, set in a prison ward inside a fake penitentiary. He saw the role, Wappler writes, as “an incredible opportunity to change what audiences had grown to expect from him.” For the author, growing up in the 1990s, Beverly Hills served as an escape from teenage angst and from grief over her father’s death from cancer. Her memoir, related in the third person, recalls tumult and loss, aspirations and pain: She marries and divorces, spends a few years in psychotherapy, becomes a successful journalist of pop culture, and marries again. Her newborn son is asleep when she learns of Perry’s death from a stroke. Although none of Perry’s immediate family agreed to participate in this biography, Wappler conducted interviews and mined sources to create a sensitive portrait of a kind and caring man.

A gift for Perry and 90210 fans.