by Tony Curtis
I was walking down Beverly Drive when a man put his hand on my arm. I stopped. He looked familiar: a stocky guy in his forties, wearing horn-rimmed glasses.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” he said. “I’m Harold Mirisch. I put up the money for Beachhead.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Sorry. How are you?” Beachhead was a picture I’d done four years earlier in Hawaii.
“You know, Tony, in the first two months of release, we made back all our money.” He paused. “Because of you.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said. “I appreciate hearing that.”
“What are you doing today?”
“I was going into this store to buy a pair of shoes.”
“Let me buy them for you.”
“You’re kidding. Any kind?”
“Any kind you want.”
So we went in. I looked around and found a pair of Symphony shoes. Black alligator, the most expensive in the store. Harold paid for them. It was a nice gesture. And an entrée into his circle.
Harold Mirisch was known for his parties. They were not so much parties as they were screenings. Movie parties. Before the so-called Beverly Hills circuit, there were guys like Harold who had screening rooms and projectors in their homes. Not sixteen millimeter. Thirty-five millimeter. Wide screen. The real deal. And the parties were catered, of course. So Janet and I started going to Harold’s movie parties. He lived on Lexington Road, behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. He’d just built the house. The house? It was a mansion. Must have cost a fortune.
I met Billy Wilder at one of these parties. No deep conversation, just hello and nice to see you again, and then on to another part of the room. As I say, I was a star, but not in Billy Wilder’s part of the firmament. As far as I was concerned, he was way up there, beyond my reach, making pictures with legends like Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich. He was nice enough, but that’s because he was a nice man, not because he thought I was important in the scheme of things.
Parties were very important in Hollywood. Very often my agent would make sure I was invited to a party because he thought something was in the air. Lew Wasserman had been my agent since 1950. His agency was part of Dr. Jules Stein’s Music Corporation of America. Thanks to Lew and Julie, MCA had its finger in a lot of pies besides agenting: radio, music, TV production. It was Lew’s idea to get actors like Jimmy Stewart to incorporate. That way they paid less tax and retained more power. When Lew took me on, he was already president of MCA. I owe a lot to that man. With all that he was doing to reshape Hollywood, he still found time for me. He made sure that Universal let me do outside pictures. He made sure that the projects I chose weren’t too tough for me, that I didn’t have to carry them all by myself—until I was ready. In the meantime, it was his idea that I be a presence at parties.
Sometimes the party would be at a producer’s house, like Jerry Wald’s, or a studio head’s, like Jack Warner’s. Other times it would be on a soundstage. The studio would dress up a stage, maybe like a Paris street or a Hong Kong street. If it was Hong Kong, they’d hire “Oriental” extras to wear costumes and be part of this setting. Or they’d decorate an outdoor set on one of those big backlots. They didn’t mind spending money like that. They had it to spend. Guys like me were making it for them.
I once got an engraved invitation that said, “Dear Tony: Join us for an end-of-the-picture soiree down by the lagoon.” It was signed, “Gregory Peck.” I drove to Twentieth, parked my car, and rode in one of those little golf carts out through the back-lot to the party. On the way I saw some of the new sets. Darryl Zanuck wanted to impress people with the sets he’d built for The Egyptian and The King and I. I have to admit that they were impressive compared to what Universal was putting up. Finally the cart dropped me off at the lagoon. There were all these people wearing South Sea Island costumes. Everybody would come to these parties and eat and drink and flirt—and make connections.
One day in early 1958, Harold called me up. He wanted me to come to a movie party. Okay. But there was something different about this one. “Come by fifteen minutes early,” said Harold. “Billy Wilder’s going to be here. He’d like to talk to you. Can you do that?” I calmly said yes, hung up, and then I got all excited. Billy Wilder. Up to that time—with a few exceptions—Universal contract guys were directing my movies. I’d finally gotten to the point where I could pick the director. But Billy Wilder? Why would he want to talk to me? I couldn’t understand it. I tried to put it out of my mind until the day of the party.
Janet and I were living on San Ysidro Drive at that time, off Benedict Canyon. On the evening of the party, I jumped into my car and drove down Benedict Canyon, heading for Lexington Road. Coming down the canyon on the way to this meeting, I felt like I was going down the Yellow Brick Road. I was touched by the idea that Billy Wilder would consider talking to me. The man had won three Academy Awards. He’d been nominated for twelve. Everything he did was quality. I’d been hoping for another quality movie, something that was really worth doing. Maybe, just maybe he wanted me to work for him. Those were the thoughts that were going through my head as I came down the canyon. I’ve never forgotten that drive.
3
When I arrived at Harold Mirisch’s house that evening, Billy Wilder was there with his wife, Audrey. He was talking with Harold. When Billy saw me, he excused himself and led me into a little room in another part of the house. He shut the door. We sat down. I was nervous. I thought to myself, Are we sitting alone in here because he doesn’t want to be seen with me? My anxiety was for nothing. He immediately put me at ease, speaking in a soft German accent.
“Tony, I wanted to talk to you about a picture I’m going to make.”
I took a breath and leaned forward.
“The story is this,” said Billy. “There are two musicians. Friends. They witness a murder. The murderer recognizes them and chases them. To get away, the two men dress up as women. Then they join an all-woman band. But there’s a beautiful girl singer. Both of our boys fall for her. Of course they can’t admit that they are boys. There’s our conflict. And there’s our story.” He paused. “Maybe you don’t like it.”
“No, no. I like it. I think it’s great. And—”
“I want you to play one of the musicians. He’s bass player. And a goofball.”
“Okay!”
“I’m going to use Frank Sinatra for the other musician, the saxophonist,” Billy said. “And Mitzi Gaynor as the singer.” He paused. “You and I have the same agent.”
“Lew Wasserman, yes.”
“I’ll talk to Lew. How does that sound to you?”
“Mr. Wilder—”
“Call me Billy.”
“Okay. Billy. Listen, it’s great. Now you’re sure you want to use me?”
“You’re the handsomest kid in this town. Who else am I going to use?”
I don’t remember what film Harold ran that night. How could I even look at the screen? I wasn’t in a theater seat. I was on a cloud. I was going to be in a Billy Wilder movie. There were actors who’d kill for this part. He wanted me.
As I later learned, this project had been in the works for some time. Billy had a fertile brain. He always had at least three projects percolating. There was something he wanted to do about a Coca-Cola executive. There was something he wanted to do with Bill Holden and Audrey Hepburn. And there was this thing with the musicians. He got the idea from a 1935 French film called Fanfares of Love. He couldn’t find a print of that film, so Walter Mirisch found him a print of the 1951 German remake Fanfaren der Liebe. Billy knew the writers who’d cooked up the original story and worked on the remake: Michael Logan and Robert Thoeren. He liked the idea well enough to ask Walter Mirisch to buy the rights from the German production company. Walter’s attorneys had to do some sleuthing to track down the owners of the rights, but they finally found them. What Billy liked about the movie wasn’t the labored workings of the plot. It wasn’t that clever. Two musicians can’t find work during the depressi
on, so they go from band to band, disguising themselves so they can get hired. One band is “all Negro,” so the musicians wear black-face. One band is Gypsy, so they wear earrings. And the last band is all girls.
Fanfaren der Liebe was what you’d call literal minded. It showed all the stuff that these guys went through to disguise themselves. It’s not all that interesting watching men shave their chests. And when one of the guys goes back to men’s clothes in order to sneak out at night, the real girls see him sneaking into his friend’s hotel room. The girls get the wrong idea and beat up the guy who’s still in drag. And so forth and so on. Billy put up with all these contrivances because he knew there was something there, something he could use. Not just use—transform. That’s what he did. He didn’t do it alone, though.
For many years Billy Wilder had a writing partner named Charles Brackett. Starting in 1937, the two of them wrote screenplays for other directors. They weren’t always happy with the result. Their dialogue was changed on the set by directors and actors. Scenes were cut. There was nothing they could do about it except become producers or directors.
Billy wrote eight pictures with Brackett before he got to direct one. That was The Major and the Minor in 1942. It was a hit for them, for Ginger Rogers, and for Paramount. Brackett coproduced their next picture, Five Graves to Cairo. Billy and Brackett went on for about seven years, turning them out. Not just movies. Great movies. Hits. I heard they had a kind of stormy working relationship and weren’t friends outside the studio. Billy had a sharp tongue. Brackett came from old money. They would yell and throw telephone books at each other across their office. It was an unlikely partnership. But they made these incredible pictures. Five Graves to Cairo. The Lost Weekend. A Foreign Affair. Then, suddenly, Billy didn’t want to work with Brackett anymore. It was in 1950, when they were writing Sunset Boulevard. One day as they were starting a session, Billy told Brackett that it was over. Brackett was shocked, especially when Billy went right to work without answering any questions. Brackett stayed shocked, but he signed the dissolution papers. He never learned what had gone wrong. Years later Billy would say only that the match didn’t strike sparks on the matchbook any more. You wouldn’t know it from looking at Sunset Boulevard.
For the next few years, Billy collaborated with a series of different writers: Charles Lederer, Ernest Lehman, and Harry Kurnitz, among others. Billy didn’t like to work alone, yet no collaborator lasted for more than one film. One night in 1955, he and Audrey went to a Writers Guild dinner. It had a revue written by various members. One skit impressed Billy. It was about trying to sell an idea to Sam Goldwyn. The skit was written by I. A. L. Diamond. Who?
His real name was Itek Dommnici, but when he was in high school he was a tri-state champion of the Interscholastic Algebra League, so he changed his name to I. A. L. Diamond and went to Columbia University. When Billy was a star director at Paramount, “Izzy” Diamond was a junior writer. By the mid-fifties, he had plenty of credits, but nothing was really happening for him.
Billy liked Izzy’s sense of humor, so Walter Mirisch signed a contract for Izzy to collaborate on Love in the Afternoon. The script was a beauty. Billy had found a collaborator who was as skilled in the English language as Brackett was, and witty in his own New York way but more accommodating. As Billy and Izzy would say, a writing partnership is like a marriage. When I met them, they were making baby number two.
How do writers write? Some of them write at home. Some get up in the morning and drive to work. Billy lived in a penthouse apartment at 10375 Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. Lots of directors had mansions in Brentwood or Bel Air or Beverly Hills. Billy liked Westwood, maybe because its proximity to UCLA made it feel like a college town—in the middle of L.A. He liked having a place with lots of light, because he owned so much art. Rouault, Matisse, Picasso. He would treat himself to a new painting when he finished a picture.
Every morning at nine, Billy would meet Izzy in their office at the Samuel Goldwyn studio, 1041 North Formosa Avenue, Hollywood. This was located at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Formosa Avenue. It was a block long, but it was a small lot compared to Paramount on Melrose or MGM in Culver City. Goldwyn was at one time owned by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, then by United Artists, and then by Sam Goldwyn. It’s the Warner Hollywood studio now. In 1958 it was a friendly place to rent an office. Billy’s company was named Ashton Productions (after a street in his neighborhood). I remember that his office was on the second floor of an old writers’ building. It was spare, but like him, it had an old-world elegance. And original art on the walls.
Billy and Izzy weren’t doing well with Fanfares of Love. They liked the hook of guys in drag acting like guys who weren’t in drag. But they couldn’t get past one basic question. Why would a guy dress in drag if he didn’t absolutely have to? They were stuck. You have to understand that Billy had been in a band in Germany in the 1920s when it was wild and you would see guys in drag in nightclubs. It was no big deal to him. There’d been a handful of Hollywood films with that conceit. Queen Christina had Greta Garbo dressed as a young guy for a few scenes. She managed it because she was Garbo. Sylvia Scarlett had Katharine Hepburn dressed as a boy. It didn’t do well. Charley’s Aunt had Jack Benny dressed as an old lady. Harmless fun, you might say. Yeah. And a huge hit. But two young studs in drag? No. The 1950s idea of shocking was Mamie Eisenhower wearing a sleeveless dress at a White House reception. If this movie was going to have guys in drag, there’d better be a good reason. “Nothing less than the threat of death,” said Billy. “They’re gonna get killed if they don’t disguise themselves.”
Izzy suggested that the story not take place in the present. If it was a period film, the drag wouldn’t be so outrageous. It would be part of a big, splashy setting. “When everybody’s dress looks eccentric,” reasoned Izzy, “somebody in drag looks no more peculiar than anyone else. No matter how many times Charley’s Aunt is revived, it’s always done in period.” America was starting to feel nostalgic for the 1920s. Compared to the 1950s, the 1920s were wild. The Jazz Age. The Era of Wonderful Nonsense. The Charleston, flappers, raccoon coats, Prohibition, bathtub gin, gangsters. Billy liked the idea of putting the story in the 1920s. This was a good day’s work, so they adjourned.
The next day Billy came in all jazzed up. “Iz,” he said, “last night when I was driving home, I got it. The Twenties. Gangsters. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. You know there was a guy who was killed who shouldn’t have been there. Some society guy. A thrill seeker, hanging out with these hoodlums. So he got killed. And the main gangster that Al Capone wanted to kill didn’t show up. Now think about that. Wrong guy. Wrong place. Wrong time. We take our musicians. We put them there. But they don’t get killed. They see it. They’re witnesses. That’s the motivation for the drag.”
That’s how my character was born.
Part II
The People
4
You might ask why Billy Wilder wanted me for this project. Who was I in 1958? How did I get there? Where did I come from?
My father was born in the town of Matészalka in Hungary. His name was Emmanuel Schwartz. He apprenticed with a tailor and came to the United States in 1921, when he was still a young man. A year later, he married a girl name Helen Stein, also from Hungary. I was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925. I don’t know where my parents met or what led to their getting married. They weren’t the kind of people who cuddled you and told you stories. And they didn’t want to relive the beginning of a marriage that wasn’t happy.
An unhappy marriage usually causes somebody an unhappy childhood. It did for me and for my brother, Julius, who was born in 1929. My parents were always fighting about money. My father had a series of tailor shops in New York’s East Side, in Brooklyn, and in the Bronx. The first one I remember was on Lexington Avenue. He cared about his work and seemed content in it. My mother wanted him to be more ambitious. He wasn’t a businessman. It just wasn’t in him. She complained
. He resisted. They argued. They screamed. Nothing improved.
Eventually my mother started taking her frustration out on me. She acted like she was mad at me, like I’d done something wrong. Sometimes she’d come after me. She’d grab me and spin me around and beat me until she was spent, and for no reason. These episodes terrified me, but I couldn’t tell my father about them. I wanted to spend time with him, and I didn’t want to mess that up with controversy.
He would take me with him to the synagogue. It was Congregation B’nai Jehuda on East Seventy-eighth Street. We’d attend on the big holy days. I can still see my father, rocking to and fro, wearing a tallith and a yarmulke, holding a prayer book, droning prayers in Hebrew. I didn’t care much for it, but it gave me the chance to be with him. Other than that, he was always working. That didn’t help when the Great Depression came. The bottom fell out of our business and out of our lives. We were evicted from our building and our clothes were scattered on the sidewalk. We ended up as squatters in an abandoned tenement.
When things improved, we moved to the Bronx and, eventually, back to Manhattan. My father opened a shop. It had a snazzy sign over it in big letters: Schwartz Dry Cleaning and Pressing. In smaller letters was: One-Day Service. We lived in a red-brick apartment building on East Seventy-fifth. Would you believe the rent was twenty dollars a month? My father was bringing in about one hundred dollars a month. He didn’t pay taxes. When we went out for dinner, it cost thirty-five cents—for the whole family. This was 1937, so I was just about twelve.