NY- COMING to the Big Apple for the first time is a thrilling experience for many – but for Oscar-winning actress Ellen Burstyn, who was 19 when she arrived here in 1952 to conquer show business, it was a sleazy ordeal at the hands of a pervy shrink with a thing for snapping photos of women patients’ bare butts.
In her upcoming autobiography, “Lessons in Becoming Myself,” the Michigan-born star of stage and screen recalls pulling into Penn Station with just 45 cents in her bag and the phone number of Dr. Carl Berger, which was given to her by a friend who described him as a “crazy psychiatrist.”
When the flame-haired beauty got to Berger’s office, Burstyn found a balding, overweight, 50-something schlub who kindly offered to set her up in a hotel and give her a tour of the city. He summoned her into an adjoining bedroom which was mysteriously crammed with stacks of pictures. Then Berger got down to business, asking her, “What kind of fanny do you have? Hmmm? Stand up. Turn around. Pull up your dress.”
“I turned back feeling frightened and unsure of what was happening,” writes Burstyn. “He saw my face and said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to see it. And take a picture. Didn’t [your friend] tell you? I’m a fanny man. See?’ He reached for a few stacks of Polaroids and held them out. No face, no legs, not even a back. Just the buttocks, one after another. Hundreds of them around the room. And this man was a psychiatrist! . . . He said, ‘I won’t touch you. This is just my hobby. I love women’s fannies. Hmmm?’ I felt embarrassed but I did it. I added my Polaroided fanny to his collection.”
The “fanny man” episode was actually the second encounter with a pervert physician for Burstyn, who earned a Best Actress Oscar for the 1974 Martin Scorsese movie “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More” and won a Tony for the Broadway smash “Same Time, Next Year.” Two years earlier, while visiting a shady Detroit doctor for an abortion, which was illegal at the time, “he put his hand on my breast, jiggled it, and said, ‘Tell that bastard to use rubbers.’ I turned my face to the wall and cried in shame.”