The toupee is gone. So, too, are four wives and most of his nine lives, along
with the screen legends who conspired with Tony Curtis to make perhaps the
most brilliant comedy film ever. At 82, the only surviving star of Some Like
It Hot is still defiantly rattling his wheelchair and spilling salacious
details about Hollywood’s golden era.
Curtis, in London last week to launch an exhibition of his oil paintings at
Harrods, the department store, talked about his fight with drugs and his
passionate affair with Marilyn Monroe years before they were cast in the
Billy Wilder comedy that would make them both cinema immortals.
The picture that emerges is of a man tormented throughout his career – by
taunts about his pretty-boy looks, by Hollywood’s reluctance to recognise
his achievements, by his failed relationships, fading allure and the years
lost to cocaine.
From the outset he felt he was destined for greatness – “From the way people
looked at me, I knew it” – but a US Navy veterans’ website reveals that it
could have been an altogether different destiny for the man born Bernard
Schwartz.
In 1943 Signalman 3rd class Schwartz, the son of poor Hungarian Jewish
immigrants, began the happiest period of his life serving aboard the USS
Proteus. He was fascinated by submarines, thanks in part to watching Cary
Grant peer through a periscope in Destination Tokyo. As a youngster he built
boats out of broom handles, powered by tin propellers and elastic bands,
which he launched on a park pond in east Manhattan.
The Proteus was a “sub tender”, alongside which submarines would tie up while
Bernie and the relief crew went aboard to clean up and scrape off the
barnacles. “It was hard work, sure, but it didn’t matter . . . because the
15 of us were waiting to be assigned to a submarine,” he wrote in
TenderTale, a website devoted to the US Navy submarine tenders.
His maritime ambitions were thwarted when the war ended and the Proteus was
ordered to round up surrendered Japanese submarines. On September 2, 1945,
he found himself in Tokyo Bay, studying General Douglas MacArthur 300 yards
away: “That was one of the great moments of my life . . . standing on the
signal bridge and watching the signing of the surrender document through a
pair of binoculars. I felt so proud to be part of the service.”
Nothing could be further from the narcissistic image of Curtis the movie star
than the man who added: “I can’t thank the navy enough. They were like my
mother. They fed me and clothed me. They kept me out of trouble and let me
see the world.”
Trouble was not long coming, but that was after he met Monroe in 1950. She was
then a redhead, hoping to get a studio contract, while he was signed to
Universal. “During that period of time we were together, we enjoyed it so
much,” he said. “She would wear no bras . . . she was sweet. Being together,
we learnt a lot about each other and about our physical needs. She was
inexperienced, but so was I.”
In a forthcoming interview with Pamela Connolly on More4, Curtis evokes a
memorable image of them lying in bed, laughing, “and her breasts jiggling up
and down”. They were together for five months before their busy schedules
pulled them apart: “We slowly stopped seeing each other. We were never with
each other long enough to start hating each other.”
Even then, Curtis seemed to understand Norma Jean’s demons: “She had a lot of
innate clumsiness about life, but that was because she had never been able
to change the course of her life.”
Elsewhere, Curtis has remarked that Monroe was not 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****** him.”
He also confessed they would never have lasted as a couple: “We were both so
empowered with wanting to be successful we could never have shared it with
each other. We could never take second billing to each other.”
Eight years later, Curtis sensed Monroe’s embarrassment when they met on the
set of Some Like It Hot. She was already hot, commanding $300,000 compared
with the $100,000 fees that Curtis and Jack Lemmon received for playing
musicians who hide from the mafia in an all-girl band: “She was a lot more
hard-nosed and part of a whole business.”
Still, Curtis had not been pining, using his good looks to great effect among
the starlets who had been fixed up with Hollywood jobs by their boyfriends.
“So these luscious tangerines would come out for a six-month contract. The
boyfriend would go back to Milwaukee. But what he didn’t know is that I am
going to get them.” Such was his reputation as a satyr that some agents and
spouses vetoed him from working with certain leading ladies.
In 1951 he married Janet Leigh, who later starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho. Their marriage produced two daughters, including the actress Jamie
Lee Curtis. His famous daughter, Curtis speculated in 2006, “doesn’t really
care for me”. For a while, he and Leigh were Hollywood’s golden couple. “But
in her eyes that goldenness started to wear off,” he said. He left her in
1962 to marry Christine Kaufmann, a 17-year-old actress.
He was married to wife No 3, Leslie Allen, when he was signed up by Lew Grade
in 1971 to make The Persuaders adventure television series, with Roger
Moore. Then his career crashed. Busted at Heathrow for marijuana possession,
within five years he was a recluse smoking crack.
He picked up the coke habit after a long day’s shooting on the 1975 film
Lepke: “This woman working on the set said, ‘Try this’. It was a packet of
paper. I knew it was cocaine. I snorted it. I found instant energy and found
a craving for it. Before I knew it, I was hooked.”
Coke turned his mind to mush: “Then I started to freebase [inhale heated
cocaine fumes]. Freebasing was much more devastating. Your mind would go off
in a different direction.” After five years he managed to get clean but
“parts of my soul have little dents in it”.
He was born in the Bronx, New York, on June 3, 1925. His parents, Emanuel and
Helen, had left Hungary to find a new life in America, where his father
opened a tailor’s shop. He was regularly beaten by his mother, who was later
diagnosed with schizophrenia. When he was eight, he and his brother Julius
were placed in an orphanage for a month because their parents could not
afford to feed them.
After his military service, Curtis studied acting in New York with Walter
Matthau and Rod Steiger before being discovered by a talent agent because “I
was the handsomest of boys”. There was a downside: “I was considered a
homosexual by my looks. I was treated in a disdainful manner.” He dealt with
his feelings of inadequacy by making “vainful gestures”.
By 1968 he had made four great movies: Sweet Smell of Success, The Defiant
Ones – for which he was nominated for a best actor Oscar – Some Like It Hot
and The Boston Strangler. But he was denied a statuette.
These days Curtis lives in self-imposed exile from Hollywood in a house near
Las Vegas, surrounded by his paintings, one of which he has lent to the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. In place of his quiffed toupee is a grey
fuzz. Recently he opted for the full Kojak: “I didn’t want to do that any
more. So I shaved everything off.”
For the past 10 years he has been married to his fifth wife, the statuesque
Jill Vandenberg (“All my wives looked like showgirls”), who is 46 years his
junior and runs a sanctuary that saves old stallions from the knacker’s
yard. The irony is not lost on Curtis, who admits that his sex drive has
somewhat abated. He has tried Viagra but no longer bothers: “I just wait
until the opportunity arises.”
