by Tony Curtis
As if things weren’t bad enough at home, they got worse at school.
“What’s your name?”
“Schwartz. Bernard Schwartz.”
“Oh, yeah. Jewish.”
If I hadn’t had to say my name, I could have passed for Italian, German, or any one of a dozen nationalities that lived in my neighborhood. But as soon as I said my name, they put me in that pigeonhole. And I was fair game. You’ve heard the names they called us, filthy, hateful names. I’m not going to dignify them by repeating them here. But I heard them all through school. The sad thing was that I thought I’d have some peace at school, a different environment, an escape from the stress of my home. No. I went from one battleground to another.
I spent a lot of time on the street, defending myself or just dodging bullies. I developed balance, speed, and a sense of timing. It’s amazing what you can do when you have to. Self-preservation, I guess.
Some of it was just kid craziness, like jumping from the roof of one apartment building to another. But it was exciting, and it took my mind off the problems at home. Sometimes Julie would come along, but usually I didn’t want him there because he might get hurt. Even with an age difference of four years, we were close. Looking back on my life at that time, I have to acknowledge that he was the only person in it that I really liked. He was a gentle little boy. I trusted him. He trusted me. But when I went out to play, I rarely took him with me. I was trying to find my own way through the world.
In 1938, when Julie was nine, he was hit by a truck. I lost him.
After this happened, I tried to cope with life the best I could. As you might expect, I had episodes of depression. I’d had these while Julie was alive, but after he died they got worse and came more often. I never knew when they’d occur. All of a sudden I would lose interest in everything around me. I’d sit in my room. I wouldn’t move. I wouldn’t answer the friends who wanted me to play stickball. I would just sit there, immobile. One way I tried to cope with depression was by drawing. While my parents were in the shop, I’d sit in a corner and draw with pencils or crayons or even with tailor’s chalk on my father’s brown wrapping paper. I copied things I saw, but when I realized that I could add things, I discovered the satisfaction of creating something. Drawing what I was seeing—or better yet, thinking—became a driving force in my life. I was proud of my drawings. I showed them to a buddy. He made fun of them. After that, he was no longer my buddy.
Another way I coped was by being rough, rowdy, and athletic. Not on a basketball court or a football field; on the streets of New York. I would climb the trestles of the el trains like I was Tarzan. I would jump from the roof of one apartment building to another, sometimes downhill. One time I misjudged and bounced off the side of another building. I cracked a few ribs. But my favorite stunt was really dangerous. I called it trolley hitching. I’d start on the sidewalk under the el. When the trolley was going about twenty miles an hour I’d run next to it, jump up, grab the window bar, and hang on. My timing was split-second. It had to be. I couldn’t afford a mistake. It was artful, but I never thought of it as anything other than physical expression. I was an athlete. Just like the ones I saw in the movies. Doug Fairbanks. Errol Flynn. Ty Power.
My other way of coping was by going to movies. The theater I attended most often, which is to say constantly, was the Loew’s Spooner on Southern Boulevard in the Bronx. I would go to the movies. And go. And I would sit there, watching these extraordinary stars, thirty-five feet high on the big screen, and wonder if they had problems. If they were human. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were immortal. These were the fantasies I had. They helped me survive.
I had a friend in high school named Gene Singer. One day I turned to him and said, “I want to be an actor. How do I get to be an actor?”
“I have no idea,” he answered. But a few days later he said he’d asked around. He was a member of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. He said there was some kind of acting group or something in the art department there. “Go see this lady,” he said, giving me a name. “It won’t cost anything.” So I did, and although nothing came of it, I got to see another kind of world. It intrigued me.
I was seventeen now, and my parents had had another child, a boy named Robert. His birth didn’t bring me closer to my family. If anything, it pushed me farther away. World War II had just started. I was underage, so I forged my mother’s signature and joined the Navy. I was in for three years, serving most of it on submarine tenders. I didn’t see any real action, but I saw guys my age come apart at the seams, and I saw guys get stabbed and blown to bits. I got through it.
When I came back to the Bronx, I decided to go to school. There was the GI Bill of Rights. When I found out I could use it to attend acting school, you would’ve thought I’d discovered gold. I was that high on the idea. So I enrolled at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School of Social Research. It was located at the President Theatre at 247 West Forty-eighth Street (not at the New School campus on Twelfth Street). Erwin Piscator was the distinguished producer-director who ran the workshop and instructed us. He was known as much for epic theater theories as for his coaching of actors. I was there for a year, along with people like Bea Arthur, Harry Belafonte, and Walter Matthau. Then I got cast in an off-Broadway production of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy, the story of a boxer who wants to be a violinist. I got the lead. Somebody important came to see this play at the Cherry Lane Theatre. All of a sudden I got a call from a talent scout asking if I could take a plane trip to Hollywood, all expenses paid. I could.
On June 1, 1948, I was in Hollywood making a screen test for Universal-International Pictures. A week later I was signing a contract. It was the traditional seven-year contract with options every six months. I’d be attending dramatic classes at the studio while it spent time and money to groom me. If it worked out, I’d be a featured player. If not, well, there are a lot of those folks in L.A. They’re called never-was-beens or Hollywood footnotes. I couldn’t think about that. I was determined to make good.
Within a few months I was cast in a Burt Lancaster picture called Criss Cross. I had a two-minute scene in which I danced with Yvonne De Carlo. Just to show you how these things work, the studio started getting letters asking who the kid with the beautiful hair was. He was Bernie Schwartz when he arrived in Hollywood. By mid-1949 he was Anthony Curtis. And he was on his way.
5
Billy Wilder loved jazz. When he was a teenager in Vienna, he learned English by repeating the lyrics of American jazz records. Some of the first records he bought were by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. Whiteman’s were among the first million-selling records. I remember hearing “Three O’clock in the Morning” and “Valencia” come out of neighbors’ windows when I was a kid.
When Billy was nineteen, he was working as a reporter for the Viennese newspaper Die Stunde. One article he wrote was about the Lawrence Tiller Girls, an all-female band from Manchester, England. It was a nice assignment for a horny young guy. There were sixteen girls. They delighted his eye and tickled his funny bone.
“Do you believe in love at first sight?” asked one girl.
“If I’m looking at you, yes!” answered another.
“Who’s Bernard Shaw?” asked a third girl. “I don’t know him.”
“Oh! I know Hamlet. It’s a good piece.”
“Oh, yes! Why doesn’t this Shakespeare guy write musical shows?”
Billy never said if he got to first base with any of those girls.
A year later, in 1926, Paul Whiteman went to Vienna on tour. Billy made himself conspicuous—and indispensable—to Whiteman. Billy talked to him about jazz in broken English. A Whiteman violinist named Matty Malneck translated.
Billy was a bright kid, and ambitious. His articles about Whiteman were so well written that Whiteman took him to Berlin with the tour. That was the city where Billy’s filmmaking began. You can see the part that jazz played in Billy’s life.
In March 1958, when he and Izzy
Diamond were working on their new project, Fanfares of Love, jazz became part of it. In the 1920s, popular songs and jazz flourished side by side. You could buy a straightforward rendition of a song like “Indiana.” This was “sweet music,” like you’d hear from a hotel dance orchestra. But you could also buy a jazz version. This was “hot,” like you’d hear from Fletcher Henderson. And they were totally different. This concept was important to our movie. A person can be more than one thing, depending on the time, the place, whatever. Sweet or hot.
Billy changed the title from Fanfares of Love to Some Like It Hot. Izzy loved the nursery rhyme that ends with “Some like it in the pot / Nine days old.” He really wanted to use the phrase “Some like it hot” from that rhyme for the film’s title. It spoke to the music, the era, everything. It had been used before. A 1939 Paramount film, one of Bob Hope’s first, was called Some Like It Hot. There was an industry rule that prevented people from using the title of a copyrighted film. Walter Mirisch asked Lew Wasserman about this. It turned out that MCA was buying all Paramount films made before 1950 so it could lease them to local TV stations. Hollywood snickered at Lew for spending $50 million on old films. Lew had the last laugh. Putting these films on the Late Show sold millions in advertising, and he made his money back in spades. Anyway, Billy had to wait for the MCA-Paramount sale to close before Walter could clear the title Some Like It Hot. It took so long that at one point they considered an alternate title, Not Tonight, Josephine. But they held on to Some Like It Hot. The writing continued, and, with it, the casting.
Before Billy approached me, he’d considered Bob Hope and Danny Kaye for the two musicians. They’d both done drag before and were as funny as you’d expect. But a whole film? And they were a little long in the tooth to play young musicians. Let’s face it: the idea of two guys in drag standing next to real women and not being detected was going to require the “willing suspension of disbelief” you read about in school. So the guys in drag had to be on the young side. I was thirty-two.
Walter Mirisch told Billy that the project needed a very big star. Billy approached Tony Perkins, but he was already signed for an Audrey Hepburn picture. When Billy talked to me at Harold Mirisch’s, he thought that Frank Sinatra was going to do it. He’d gone to Palm Springs to pitch Sinatra the idea and thought Sinatra liked it. Billy made a lunch date with him in Beverly Hills to work out the details. Sinatra didn’t bother to show up. Of course he was one of the most powerful men in the industry, so he could get away with that, but I’m sure it hurt Billy’s pride. It had to. Billy made the best of it, and he later conceded that he could never have worked with Sinatra. “I’m afraid,” said Billy “that he would have run off after the first take. ‘Bye-bye, kid,’ Frank would say. ‘That’s it. I’m going. I’ve got to see a chick.’ That would drive me crazy.” It looked like Sinatra was out. But UA still wanted a big star.
Billy thought about the character of the girl singer, Stella Kowalczyk. (Her name was later changed to Sugar Kowalczyk, singing under the stage name of Sugar Cane. The name was spelled “Cane” in our scripts, but changed to “Kane” before the premiere.)
Mitzi Gaynor was being considered for the part of Sugar. I thought that Mitzi was a major talent. She’d sparkled in South Pacific. But was she strong enough for this part? Sugar was pivotal to the story, but she wasn’t as individual as either of the musicians. Jerry, the bass player, was earnest, adaptable, and wacky. Joe, the saxophone player, was a sexy, risk-taking skirt chaser. The friendship between these two guys was going to make the story. By comparison, Sugar was a little vague, which made Billy think. If Sugar was the weakest part, he needed to give it the strongest casting.
Now who was the biggest star they could get? Elizabeth Taylor? She’d just been widowed. Audrey Hepburn? Not right for a band vocalist. What about Marilyn Monroe? You’d better believe that the Mirisches liked that idea. Of course it had its drawbacks. Marilyn hadn’t made a picture in two years. She didn’t want to play any more “dumb blondes.” Billy had directed her in The Seven Year Itch. She had great comic timing, but she had no concept of time. Stage fright and insecurity made her constantly late. When she finally arrived, she was unpredictable. “She had trouble concentrating,” Billy said. “There was always something bothering her. Directing her was like pulling teeth.” The Seven Year Itch made $8 million in 1955, but Billy said, “I’ll never work with Monroe again.”
The UA bosses were adamant. Billy had to sign a big star or he’d lose Some Like It Hot. There wasn’t much hope that Sinatra would change his mind. Then Billy got a letter from Marilyn. He almost fell over. After the problems they’d had on Seven Year Itch, she was writing to tell him how much she’d enjoyed it and how very much she wanted to work with him again. What? He had to think about this. Oh, boy, did he. “Marilyn wanted the part,” he recalled. “So we had to have Marilyn. We opened every door to get Marilyn.”
Years later, he explained why he decided to work with her a second time. “When you got her to the studio on a good day,” said Billy, “she was remarkable. She had a quality that no one else ever had on the screen, except Garbo. No one. She was a kind of real image, beyond mere photography. She looked on the screen as if you could reach out and touch her.”
On March 17, Billy wrote to Marilyn at the New York apartment she shared with her husband, the playwright Arthur Miller. Billy thanked her for her letter and enclosed a two-page treatment of the Some Like It Hot story. He was at his most persuasive in his letter:As one Arthur Miller will substantiate, nothing is more frustrating for a dramatist than to expose the bare bones of something he is working on. However, the script is only partly written, and since time seems to be of the essence, I would rather take the risk of sending this cold-blooded outline than of losing you altogether. You have to give me enough credit to assume that the piece, skimpy as it may sound in synopsis, will be written on the highest level, and that the characters will emerge live and three-dimensional. It has always been my theory that a story should be as simple and graphic as possible, to give oneself enough leeway to explore the characters fully, and develop the situations in depth. Don’t be misled into thinking that this story is going to be treated as a farce—because unless some real emotion emerges from all this comedy, we will have failed.
Billy went on to tell the story in which Stella, the vocalist in an all-girl band, loses her heart to a saxophone player whom she has thought to be a girl. Billy mentioned Sinatra as a possible costar, and support from Edward G. Robinson, George Raft, James Cagney, and Paul Muni, plus the nostalgic appeal of Jazz Age songs that Marilyn could sing. Billy concluded his letter on a surprisingly straightforward note. “By all means,” he wrote, “keep in mind that I’m dying to work with you again. Oh, yes—we want to get going on the picture sometime this summer—like about July 15.”
The Mirisches were primed. They were still hoping for Sinatra, too. They figured $200,000 for him, $200,000 for Marilyn, plus a negotiable percentage of the gross. Billy waited for Marilyn to read the treatment. He heard nothing. He didn’t press her. In late March he told Arthur Krim of United Artists that shooting could start in July—with Sinatra, Marilyn, and me.
There were rumors going around, so I called Billy. He was glad to hear from me. “Tony, we’re putting it together,” he said. “It’s going to be you, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn. And for the gangsters, we’re getting Eddie Robinson and George Raft.” After Billy said Marilyn’s name, I didn’t hear much. A lot of feelings were welling up inside me.
6
I’ve got a rich memory bank. It’s bursting with treasures. Almost anything can open it up. A sound, a song, a scent, and memories come pouring out. So it was when Billy said Marilyn’s name. After I hung up the phone, I wasn’t in a den on San Ysidro in March 1958. I was in a garden on Sycamore Avenue in 1950. Sycamore House was my first residence in Hollywood. It was a rooming house for aspiring actors located on Sycamore Avenue, just below Franklin, and it was prettier than you might think: lots of trees
and a garden and a pool, even though the pool was never cleaned. It was filled with leaves. But the feeling of the place was nice, very different from New York. There was one drawback, however. It was like the Studio Club on Lodi Place, where the young actresses lived. You could not invite anyone up to your room. If you wanted to go courting, you had to make other arrangements.
I wanted to. There were beautiful girls everywhere, popping out of doorways, falling out of pepper trees, breezing by in convertibles. And not just actresses. Every girl was beautiful, even the ones who rode bicycles from stage to stage and office to office at Universal, delivering scripts. I’d watch them as they breezed by. If one of them gave me a look, letting me know she was interested, I’d show my interest right back. I was still the brash kid from New York, shy and unsure, but I was trying to find myself.
I found my stage name in the one and only book that I read while I was in the Navy, Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse. I’d seen the picture with Fredric March years earlier. I told a casting director that I wanted to call myself Anthony Adverse. “No,” he shook his head. “The picture’s being reissued. You’ll look silly.” I kept the Anthony. I had a relative named Janush Kertiz. Nice guy. Kertiz is a common Hungarian name. I modified it to Curtis. I thought to myself, Tony Curtis—what a perfect name that is, just a little mysterious. Universal agreed, and I became Anthony Curtis.
I first saw my new name in the papers on February 28, 1949. It was an article in the Los Angeles Times about the third picture I’d made, City Across the River. The article said that because of my work in the picture, Universal was going to give me a star rating. Wishful thinking perhaps, but I kept working, and my name kept appearing in the papers. And I kept getting cast.