Luke Perry: New book about the Beverly Hills Star talks about his violent and alcoholic father

“A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How a Generation Grew Up”. This is the title of the new one for the star of “Beverley Hills” who died only at 52 years old. Author of the book is not one of his children, but Margaret Wappler who uses Luke Perry as an excuse to talk about the loss of her father. At the same time, the dedicated admirer of the actor and the series “Beverly Hills”, has gathered dozens of testimonies of people who met Luke Perry well, to capture the enormous impact the actor had on a generation who grew up with the unruly Dylan who stole hearts. His daughter is only three years older than Margaret Wappler when she had lost her father. Luke Perry died at the age of 52, after a stroke. At the height of his reputation, he was a teenage idol. His charming face adorned the covers of magazines around the world. Even a Barbie – a copy of its television character, Dylan, was launched. In real life, he married Rachel Sharp in November 1993 with whom they had two children, 26-year-old Jack and 23-year-old Sophie, before their divorce, ten years later. Perry was engaged to Wendy Madison Bauer just before he died according to the actor’s representative. His life, however, had not begun with the best omens. His father, as Wappler, Coy Luther II writes, was a violent alcoholic who abused his mother. “I always felt I should be able to protect her more, but I was a six-year-old. That’s where my despair comes from. I’ve been seeing the problems clear since I was six. In retrospect, this was all very scary,” he would later say. His parents took a beating when he was 6 years old. His mother’s second husband, Steve Bennett, “a builder with a daughter, taught his stepson how to use tools, the dignity of manual labor, and that a real man is, above all, tender” is mentioned in the new book. Even his minor co-stars in “Beverly Hills” would become a father figure himself. “She taught me that it is important to say my opinion when I should” one of them, Camrey Bagley Fox, remembers today. While another colleague, who is a mother herself, Marisol Nichols, comments that “you understood he was a very good father. He was talking to me about the tricks he did, like pretending, at Christmas, that Santa Claus is coming, and I was telling him mine.” After all, once the cameras were closed, he enjoyed more than anything else discussing his Tennessee farm and his family. “He was just talking about these little people he loved so much,” he writes. “He smiled about his children, who he loved so much” writes Margaret Wappler. “It is hard to be impressed by someone who is so relaxed and unpretentious” he notes. “He would not want to be remembered as a teenage heartbreaker but as a good man” concludes the book.