In her book, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography, Victoria Price explored the many faces of her famous Dad who died in 1993. His career on both stage and screen lasted some 60 years and he remains THE preeminent horror icon of our time. (Of course, that chilling voice at the end of Michael Jackson‘s Thrilleris Price.)
In an exclusive interview with Boom Magazine Victoria shed some light on the the speculation.
“Everybody asks me was your dad bisexual, was he bisexual. And it was Roddy McDowall who said to me, you know, we didn’t have any idea what bisexuality meant in that sense, and if we didn’t know, then how can we know the answer to that question.”
The out designer, art consultant, author, and public speaker has been wrestling for decades with just how much of her father’s private life is public domain, as recounted in this 2012 blog post:
“I was standing at the bar in West Hollywood, Calif.’s club of the moment one night in the spring of 1989, talking with a group of hip Hollywood women I hardly knew, when a blond woman with a wry expression came over to me and said,
‘You’re Vincent Price’s daughter. Your father’s gay, isn’t he?’
I don’t remember my mumbled reply– except that, sadly, it wasn’t very witty – ‘I don’t know’ or ‘He was married three times.’ But I do remember that I was shocked. Not because it was the first time someone had suggested that he might be gay or at the very least bisexual, but because, until that moment, I hadn’t really understood the degree to which my 78-year-old father’s sexuality, whatever it might be, had become public property to be discussed, analyzed, bandied about, as one might share a recipe or chat about the weather. I found it a discomforting revelation.”
Victoria is well aware of our fixation with celebrity and the news-driven, “prying eyes” culture that we now live but she also aware that as a member of the LGBT community that there’s a yearning for history and heroes and a connection to the past…