Tony Curtis
Some like hot movies
More
than 150 films, 1000 lovers, five wives, a cruel mother, a dead son, an
estranged daughter. Tony Curtis relives it all for
IF you have lived the life Tony Curtis has, and lived it to 81, you need
survival strategies. For Curtis, one is making art: the studio of his
two-bedroom home overlooking Las Vegas, where he lives in self-imposed exile
from his Hollywood detractors, bursts with his: surrealist boxes filled with
mementoes of his life and splashy, schildlike paintings.
A second strategy is psychotherapy: since the 1950s, when
he would visit a shrink four times a week, he has been a fan of that.
And a third? Perhaps it is to sit on a tall director's chair in the middle of
your sitting room and, in your unvarnished Bronx, speak with mad candour to a
stranger about the love you have been deprived of. This is what he does with me,
as the dry Nevada sun blares down outside and his cats patrol the room, shedding
their fur.
"You see, my dear friend," he bellows from his vantage point above
me, his knees looking me in the eye from beneath a pair of white shorts,
"it is only in my candidness and my honesty that I can face those
realities."
His self-honesty fails him sometimes. If a toupee is subterfuge, his
grey-white quiff, a rethink of the Tony Curtis haircut that was once the most
copied in the world, fibs. And he deludes himself too about The Persuaders!, the
British adventure series he made in 1971, in which he played the Yankee playboy
Danny Wilde to Roger Moore's Lord Brett Sinclair and which has been reborn on
DVD.
For Curtis, The Persuaders! was the precipice from which his career toppled.
Busted at Heathrow for marijuana possession when he entered Britain, within four
years he was a Los Angeles recluse smoking crack.
"I could have killed myself. I think I was aiming in that
direction," he says. "In one of my foggy moments I thought maybe I'd
just keep going. I was very, very unhappy: unhappy with my career, unhappy with
the marriage I was in. I'd never leave my apartment. I would set up my little
laboratory and I would make whatever I was going to smoke. I'd invite girls to
come up. It was scary: the depths of despair and unhappiness." He had
turned 50. "I looked around me and saw other actors younger than I, and a
little bit older, doing well, and I wasn't doing well. I can understand it now.
I wasn't reliable enough to use. The word got out that I was using, but
everybody was using in those days, don't you see?"
His attempted self-destruction lasted 18 months. "It would have killed
an ordinary man," he boasts. "I like to say that expression. But I
saved myself. Because I wanted to see my sons grow up."
Yet even after Hugh Hefner invited him to recuperate in the Playboy mansion,
even after three spells in the Betty Ford Clinic, the demon that drove him to
drugs continued to nag him.
"I felt I'd been neglected by my profession. That's what's been driving
me all my life. I had hoped that my profession and the industry would have been
kinder. You see, I got into the movies because of my looks. Nobody can jerk me
off and tell me I didn't. I was the handsomest of boys. I was 22 years old. You
couldn't get better-looking than me. What a gift I was given! So I didn't get in
the movies because I was a great actor. That I learned. I learned on the
job."
By 1968, he had made four movies that could have won him Oscars: Sweet Smell
of Success, in which he was the sleazy, panda-eyed PR man Sidney Falco; The
Defiant Ones, for which he was jointly nominated with Sidney Poitier ("How
you gonna cut the statue in half?"); Some Like it Hot, where he
cross-dressed and made love to his former girlfriend Marilyn Monroe; and The
Boston Strangler. He became, I say, a great actor. "Thank you. So nice of
you to say that to me. That means a lot to me. The way they treated me at the
beginning! People at the Actors Studio used to snicker, say negative things
about me. I should have been a girl with tits. I would do better. That just
fired me so much on the inside. I had it tough when I was a kid growing up in
New York City, very difficult. I lost my brother in a truck accident - I was 12,
he was nine - plus the anti-Semitism I ran across. And perhaps maybe because the
way I looked when I was a boy, fresh-faced ..."
Made him vulnerable? "I've always been vulnerable. I had no education. I
never finished high school."
***
HE has his portrait taken. When he returns from the studio, his assistant is
going through his mail. It contains one of those shhildren's letters that can
only have been dictated by an adult.
"You are a role model for American youth," runs its gist.
"What advice can you give me?" Curtis, a less sensitive soul when
performing to an audience of more than one, replies: "Date girls with big
tits."
He resumes his throne. Tits aside, what was he really looking for from the
thousand women he claims to have slept with?
"Some knowledge of myself. It's very uplifting for a man when you can
see in a woman's eyes that she understands you, that she's not cruel, that she's
being sweet, that she doesn't overpower you with anything except her beauty. I
can usually remember them, how cruel and unnecessarily mean they were with me. I
just thought of a girl that was very demeaning to me on a number of occasions,
here in Vegas, a beautiful girl. I'd love to go with her. We had a wonderful sex
life but when we weren't doing sex, she was always degrading, demeaning about my
acting, about my background, my speech. We would stay at the Sands Hotel, hang
out with Frank Sinatra. One night she said, 'I've got something to tell you. I'm
pregnant and the only one I've been with is you."
"I said, 'Well, boy, did you get f---ed, because I've had a
vasectomy."
He slaps his thighs at this distant deception.
***
BERNARD Schwartz, the boy who became Tony Curtis, was born into the poverty
of The Bronx in 1925, the son of Emanuel, a Hungarian tailor, and his wife,
Helen. Helen Schwartz stands at the head of a long line of women who let him
down. I ask if he can forgive her.
"Perhaps I understand more what my mother's dilemma was. As a quid she
slapped the hell out of me. I didn't know that as a little girl she was shoved
out at six years old with her sister to clean houses. Six years old! I didn't
know what she had been through and my mother, who was not very stable to begin
with, became more and more schizophrenic.
"When she met my father in New York she had just come to America. She
was 19 or 20, a beautiful, good-looking woman, but nuts. She was already living
in that schizophrenic world."
Bobby Schwartz, who died in an asylum in 1993, was also schizophrenic.
"My brother, yes. So it was, I guess, a family trait."
***
I NOTICE his house is scattered with paintings of Monroe. "I loved her.
I was 22. She was 19 when we first met. And she loved me. We were about five
months together. I was under contract to Universal and she wasn't under contract
to anybody, and I met her at the studio. Her hair was kind of red. It wasn't
blonde. She was a little heavier. Very voluptuous looking.
"So we started going out together. We had a wonderful time together.
Thinking back on it, we were just qiids. We were learning about orgasms. We were
learning about what you do and how not to do it. Then we'd see each other at
cocktail parties, all through the next four, five, six years. Keep in touch.
"But over those five years, to get started in the business, Marilyn
wasn't very smart. She was easily induced into relationships. She'd meet a guy
who says, 'I'll get you in the movies' and the next thing you know she's f---ing
him."
When they came to make Some Like it Hot in 1959, he thinks she was
embarrassed that he knew so much about her. At first she would not talk to him.
But there were love scenes to do.
"She would rub up against me and give me an erection. She did that
deliberately. I didn't mind, but she'd rub against me while I was lying down and
then before they'd yell 'Cut!' and before she'd get off me she'd say, 'Tony, did
you like that one?'
"Then one day we were in the projection room watching (the rushes). One
guy says, 'Hey, what was it like kissing her?' I said, 'Like kissing Hitler.
What do you think? What are you asking me for?' And that's the remark that made
it into the quote books. For the wrong reason, all the wrong reason."
***
AFTER a stint in the navy Curtis arrived in LA in 1948 to take drama lessons
and within four years had married Janet Leigh, later Alfred Hitchcock's murder
victim in Psycho. Their 11-year marriage produced two daughters, Kelly and Jamie
Lee Curtis. His next, to Austrian actor Christine Kaufmann, lasted from 1963 to
1967. There would be three more marriages.
I ask if his wives furnished him with the love his mother had not.
"Some did. I've had five wives to try out. They were all beautiful. That
was one of the requisites. And when I was married I was devoted. I don't want to
be unkind about women but that was an important one. I'm a stickler for certain
details, like you can't have extramarital relations."
He was never unfaithful? I ask incredulously. "Never, until - there's
always an until - I realised that the woman didn't care for me."
By the time he relocated to London for The Persuaders! he was married to
model Leslie Allen, his wife for a dozen years until divorce in 1982. I show him
a TV Times article of that era portraying a happy family: him and Leslie, their
sons Nicholas and Benjamin, and his daughters by Kaufmann, Alexandra and Alleyn.
"Oh my god! There you are. Oh my god! Oh dear! How sweet that looks!
I've got a letter somewhere that I wrote to the boys. I never showed it to them
but I've got it somewhere. I said how much I loved them. Not that that's a big
deal. You can love anything but, you know, I let them down. I did. I became very
selfish.
"To do what I did you had to be very selfish, very selfish, think of
yourself only. And cowardly. Why am I still alive? Why didn't I bump myself off
during that terrible, terrible period of time? And I didn't. The boys were
always on my mind. Eighteen years later I lost Nicholas."
He died in 1994 from a heroin overdose. Director Billy Wilder mercilessly
told Curtis that Nicholas had learned the habit from him. "But I'm not an
addict. I'm an abuser but not addicted. That's where my luck is, otherwise I'd
have been gone way before these guys were born."
***
I TAKE issue with him about being a neglectful father. At his 80th birthday
party, Jamie Lee Curtis spoke movingly about her father. According to Hello!
magazine, he cried.
He looks at me. He is not sure she was speaking from her heart.
"I've never said this before. I feel that she doesn't really care for
me. Perhaps she and her sister, during those early teen years, missed me around
the house, but by that time I couldn't be with Janet Leigh any more, you know?
She was disappearing into her own madnesses and that's the truth."
He asks to see the TV Times picture. "Intriguing. Jamie's not in the
picture, is she? Intriguing. It says a lot about her already not being there.
Isn't that interesting?"
Will they be close now? "I don't think so. I think there's some jealousy
between us, perhaps. At the beginning I have a feeling she wanted - I've never
said this to anybody - she wanted to teach me a lesson for abandoning her mother
and her. For her it became a battle more than a career. I have a feeling that
she wanted to put me in my place."
She wanted to be a bigger star than him? "Yes, perhaps that was it.
Jamie's having a tough time now. She can't play the ingenue any more and that
must be tough for her. A man can segue, but not a woman. It's a very tough
profession for a woman. So all of these things spark and come into it, you know.
And there's a secret in Jamie that I can't disclose."
He does, of course, off the record, necessitating an emergency breakfast the
next day between me and his lawyer. The secret is really no one's business.
***
AT his 80th, Curtis was pictured holding hands with someone who looked like
the Marilyn impersonator who had burst out of a cake to serenade him. The blonde
was in fact Jill Vandenberg, the woman he married eight years ago, after the
failure of a brief fourth marriage in the mid-1990s. She is 183cm tall, 46 years
his junior and, stricken with stomach flu, is today nowhere to be seen. Her
passion is the Shiloh Horse Rescue and Sanctuary, a charity that saves old
stallions from knackers yards. Hollywood can insert its own jokes.
"I know what they thought. Jilly's a beautiful woman with big bosoms and
beautiful legs and she's 35 now and I'm 81," Curtis says. "They said,
'That's going to last less than the week it took to take out the licence.' I
love her very much. I care for her and she cares for me. She's very candid and
very straight with me. So we're having the most wonderful time together."
How is his sex drive these days? "It was very powerful when I was a
young man. It's somewhat abated now, settled down a little bit. I became
concerned after a while when I found I was not - what's the word? - as
stimulated as I used to be. I wondered if it was because I had experienced so
much or whether it was the natural grace of growing older."
There is always Viagra. "Yes, there is and I have used some. But now I
don't bother. I just wait until the opportunity arises."
He sounds happier now sex is no longer the force it was in his life.
"I'm much happier now. I was so f---ing vulnerable. I had an erection
everywhere I went. It was pointing the direction I'd go. I'm not being facetious
now or trying to be funny with you, I'm telling you the truth."
I am sure he is. By the late '60s his reputation as a satyr was so engorged
that husbands and agents vetoed him from working opposite certain female leads.
Perhaps that was why, by 1971, he was zooming down the Kings Road, not Sunset
Boulevard; working for ITV, not MGM. Perhaps that was why the academy never
awarded him that Oscar.
"I used to get pissed off with it all, but I don't any more. Do you know
why, my dear friend? Because I'm sitting here in this extraordinary home with
this fabulous view. I'm known all over the world. I'm a wealthy man. I'm
friendly and open with everybody I meet. I'm so happy I can't see
straight."
And he leads me out to his patio with its vista, not of Tinseltown but the
desert, and suggests I join him in the paddling pool. In its shallows, the
reporter in his suit and the tennis-short-clad star, his haircut eclipsed by a
Stetson, embrace. Curtis's strategy in life is to lunge for whatever love he
can.
The Times
