The Making of Some Like It Hot

by Tony Curtis

  Marilyn was not unintelligent. She was bright, perceptive, and insightful—but only about other people. When it came to herself, or to issues relating to herself, she didn’t have a clue. She needed constant reassurance. She almost didn’t sign the Mirisch contract. She was overcome with uncertainty. After she first read Billy’s synopsis, she became upset. She’d left Hollywood because she was sick of playing dumb blondes. What was this? The story of a blonde so dumb that she can’t tell that these women weren’t really women. One day Marilyn threw the papers onto the floor. Miller tried to reason with her. She didn’t want to listen. So who did she go to? Mr. Strasberg.

  “Lee, I’ve got a real problem,” she said. “I just can’t believe in the central situation. I’m supposed to be real cozy with these two newcomers, who are really men in drag. Now how can I possibly feel a thing like that? After all, I know the two are men.” Strasberg had to think about that one.

  “Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult, Marilyn,” Lee began. “You know it’s always been difficult for you to have a relationship with women. They’re jealous of you. When you come into a room, all the men flock around, but women kind of keep their distance. So you’ve never been able to make a true woman friend.”

  “That’s almost true.”

  “A lot of men have wanted to be your friend, but you haven’t had a girl friend. Now here suddenly are two women, and they want to be your friends! They like you. For the first time in your life, you have two girl friends.”

  Marilyn was momentarily soothed. But she was still irresolute.

  “Should I do my next picture or stay home and try to have a baby again?” she wrote to her friend Norman Rosten. “I’d probably make a kooky mother; I’d love my child to death. I want it, yet I’m scared. Arthur says he wants it, but he’s losing his enthusiasm. He thinks I should do the picture. After all, I’m a movie star, right?” In late April she signed the contract with the Mirisch Company.

  On April 25, Billy sent a telegram to New York. “Dear Marilyn: I am genuinely delighted to have you aboard. Hope to see both you and Arthur soon in Smogsville, at which time I would also like to discuss the Misfits script. Affectionately, Billy.” Miller was writing a screenplay based on his short story “The Misfits,” which had appeared in Esquire a year earlier. The writing was not going well. Marilyn was trying to be both supportive and unobtrusive, but Miller’s anxiety was starting to tell on the relationship.

  Meanwhile, Billy and Izzy were in their office writing Some Like It Hot. They were across the hall from Walter Mirisch, so they would go to lunch with him. Obviously he was interested in what they were coming up with. The work wasn’t glamorous. Billy compared himself and Izzy to bank tellers, coming in at nine and plugging away at the thing all day. But writing is mysterious. How do you do it, especially with another guy? First of all, they divided the labor, in part because they were different. Billy was kinetic. He liked to move around. He didn’t like sitting. He was always pacing back and forth, throwing ideas around the room, some of which Izzy would catch, some of which floated into the ether. Izzy was content to sit at the typewriter, like he was driving a car. He’d take everything down, all the crazy thoughts. He liked typing. Billy didn’t. He didn’t like being stuck behind the typewriter. It made him uncomfortable, and it was boring.

  They would work on the overall structure first, then make sure all the funny ideas fit. That’s probably how they knew that the musicians needed only one disguise. That was funny enough. But who knows what they really thought, what ideas were flying around that office? I heard that they acted out scenes to make sure they played. Billy would play one character. Izzy would play the other. They would decide every element there, rather than having Izzy go off and dream something up and come back to show it to Billy. No. They agreed where the thing was going, got it down, and then Izzy would go home and type up the draft. The next day Billy would look at it. “Mm hm,” he would say. “Okay. Now . . . let’s see what we can do to make it better.” There’d be a lot of smoking, maybe a cocktail at lunch, but mostly batting ideas back and forth. Once in a while they’d hit a dry patch, and there would be silence for hours. But not often. Once they’d gotten rolling, they had momentum.

  One thing I found interesting: they would start a picture with an incomplete script. As they were making the picture, they saw it go in directions they hadn’t expected, and they wanted to be able to follow that lead. I know this happened on our picture.

  While the script was growing, Billy was thinking about who could play Joe, the other musician. One night he was having dinner with his wife, Audrey, at Dominick’s on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood. In those days it was a modest little place with red-checkered tablecloths. Billy looked up and saw Jack Lemmon sitting with his girlfriend, Felicia Farr. Billy waved across the room to Jack, who immediately came to his table.

  “Do me a favor,” said Billy. “Sit down for a minute. I have an idea for a picture I would like you to play in.”

  “We’ve just ordered,” said Jack. “Could I see you in a few minutes?”

  “We’ll stop by your table on our way out,” said Billy.

  Jack sat down and waited. You can imagine that he was a little anxious. Finally Billy and Audrey came over.

  “Listen to this idea,” said Billy.

  “Sit down,” said Jack. “Please. I want to hear all about it.”

  “I haven’t got time to tell you everything now,” said Billy, “but I’ll give you a rough idea. It’s about two men on the lam from gangsters, running for their lives. They dress up in girls’ clothes and join an all-girl orchestra.”

  “They do. Hm.”

  “Which means that you’ll play three quarters of the film in drag. At least.”

  “Uh huh.” Jack was looking Billy in the eye. But he was thinking, Oh, Jesus Christ. We’re in drag and everything. But wait a minute. Billy Wilder is doing it. It’s not going to be in bad taste.

  “Do you want to do it?” asked Billy.

  “I’ll do it if I’m free to do it,” said Jack. “And if I’m not free, I’ll get free.”

  “Terrific,” said Billy. “I’ll send you some pages.”

  I’d known Jack for some time. He was a good friend of an artist that I knew, Joseph Cornell. Jack was at Columbia Pictures. We’d become friends because we were both young guys with contracts, making a proper living as actors. I’d see him at parties. Then Jack won the Oscar for Mister Roberts and moved to a different echelon. Even though Danny Kaye kept after Billy to be in this film, Billy kept saying no. He had me, and he knew that he had to find just the right guy to play my friend. Maybe Danny would have overwhelmed me. Maybe I would have made him look old. For whatever reason, Billy said no to Danny. “I want this kid Lemmon from Columbia,” he decided all of a sudden. Jack said later that he would have run like a jackrabbit if any other director had asked him to play a transvestite. “Everybody in town thought that Wilder had lost his marbles,” Jack told me. “How can you put two stars in drag for that much of a movie? That’s a five-minute sketch, not a movie.” But Billy had a unique track record. “I admired what he had done in the past,” said Jack. “Immensely.”

  Jack didn’t hear from Billy for months after their conversation at Dominick’s. Then a messenger brought a package to Jack’s home in Bel Air. It contained sixty pages of script. Jack lay down on his couch to read it. “They were the greatest sixty pages I ever read,” he told me. “I laughed so hard that I fell off the couch! Literally!” He jumped in his car and drove to Goldwyn. He burst into Billy’s office, holding the script.

  “Billy! Where’s the rest of this?”

  “You won’t get it until we’re shooting,” Billy told him.

  And that’s when Jack learned that Billy started shooting with an unfinished script.

  About the same time I was at Harold Mirisch’s house for another movie party. Up walked Billy.

  “I’m not going to use Sinatra,” he said to me. “He’s going to be too
much trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “He’ll have to dress up as a woman every day, and I just can’t see Frank doing that.”

  At this point I was wondering if I could do it. But I nodded and listened. Billy looked around the room and continued.

  “I’m going to use Jack Lemmon instead.”

  What Billy did next was switch our roles. Instead of playing Jerry, the crazy bass player, I would play Joe, the randy sax player. Jack would play Jerry. Marilyn would play Stella, now renamed Sugar. With this lineup, the whole project came to life. The balance of the story changed. That combination was happy; that chemistry was vibrant. That’s how pictures are made.

  Billy’s casting coup didn’t end with the principals. He also cast the supporting parts: the girls, the gangsters, and Osgood the eccentric millionaire. Billy Wilder was a great baseball fan. He always attended the season opener. This was a big one. The Dodgers were starting their first season as a Los Angeles team. The opening ceremonies on April 18 included a parade and a celebrity luncheon to benefit the Los Angeles Orphanage Guild. The master of ceremonies at the Biltmore Bowl was Joe E. Brown. This guy was a booster. In those days baseball games were played at the Coliseum. Joe E. was campaigning to have a stadium built above Sunset. (He would eventually dedicate Dodger Stadium.) Billy took a look at Joe E. and recognized him from 1930s Warner Bros. comedies. “This is the guy,” Billy said out loud. “Osgood. The crazy guy. Joe E. Brown. He’s old enough and he looks loony enough.”

  Billy told me that he was going to have George Raft play the gangster Spats Columbo and Edward G. Robinson play the big boss Little Bonaparte. They’d made a Warner Bros. picture in 1941 called Manpower, directed by Raoul Walsh. Billy liked the combination, so he wanted to put them together again. But there was a problem he’d forgotten. Or maybe he didn’t know about it.

  While Raft and Robinson were making Manpower, they both got interested in the leading lady, Marlene Dietrich. They became rivals. There was tension on the set. One day it blew up, and they came to blows. Unfortunately, it was the same day that the publicist had a Life magazine photographer there. He caught the fistfight. Life magazine ran the picture. There wasn’t a goddamned thing that Warners could do about it. If it had been the unit stills photographer, Warners could have destroyed the film and paid those old bitches Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons to write about how much Raft and Robinson respected each other. But there was no way that Warners could bribe Life. The picture ran. And the story. Robinson vowed never to work with Raft again.

  Billy also had a history with Raft. He’d offered him Double Indemnity. Raft turned him down. Imagine. Of course, Raft had turned down High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca, too. Humphrey Bogart accepted those roles and became a star. When Raft turned down Double Indemnity, Billy told some columnist that he was sure that it was going to be a great picture—because Raft had turned it down.

  In 1958 Billy either didn’t know about Robinson’s attitude toward Raft or thought he’d get over it. As the budget was being drawn up, Robinson was still part of the package. In Billy’s mind, Some Like It Hot was cast.

  Billy and Izzy completed their first draft (except for the ending, of course) on May 2, so Walter Mirisch submitted the budget to United Artists. It came to $2,373,490. Marilyn Monroe would get $200,000. I would get $100,000 against 5 percent of the gross over $2 million. Jack Lemmon would get the same. Izzy Diamond would get $60,000. Because Billy was producing, directing, and cowriting, he would get $200,000 plus 17.5 percent of the gross above double the negative cost. But if the picture grossed $1 million (or more) after it broke even, Billy would get 20 percent. You can see why talent wanted to work with UA. Of course, Arthur Krim was a touch nervous, what with the huge salaries and Marilyn’s reputation for slowing things down. But there was nothing much to worry about. In the third week of July, we reported to the studio for tests. You can’t start a picture without tests—especially if you’re going to be in drag.

  Part III

  The Preproduction

  8

  I started to get excited about Some Like It Hot in June. So did Hollywood. When people heard that Marilyn Monroe was returning, it was like the circus was coming to town. Everyone in the press started jockeying for position, fighting for assignments. Hedda Hopper got there first. She had to fly to New York to scoop her rival Louella, but she did it. This was the first coverage of Marilyn’s involvement in the project. Marilyn and Arthur Miller had an apartment at 444 East Fifty-seventh Street. That’s where Hedda interviewed them. Arthur started talking first, then excused himself to get back to his typewriter. “I’m working on a novel,” he explained. “The Misfits. I’m doing a screenplay of it, too. And I’m writing a new play. Don’t ask me when any of them will be finished. I don’t know. I’m not a fast writer.”

  Hedda wanted to know how Marilyn felt about working in a comedy. Would she be able to jump from drama to comedy and back again? And how about the atmosphere on the set? Would she be nervous? “I’m not a quick study,” Marilyn began. “I’m not experienced enough as an actress to chat with friends and workers on the set and then go straight into a difficult dramatic scene. Some actors can chat and laugh and then go straight into a serious mood before the camera. I can’t. I like to go directly from my dressing room to the scene. After that, I go back to my dressing room and concentrate on the next one. I like to keep my mind in one channel. All I can think of is my performance. I like to make it as good as I know how.”

  We were originally scheduled to start makeup and wardrobe tests in early July, but there was an accident. Samuel Goldwyn, besides renting space to the Mirisches and Billy, was making a picture in his own studio. It was a big one. Porgy and Bess, with Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dorothy Dandridge. Rouben Mamoulian had directed both the original DuBose Heyward play and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess on Broadway. He was going to direct the film. Goldwyn had a sprawling set built on Stage 8: Catfish Row. It was the largest set yet built in Hollywood, an amazing set, full of texture and detail. I enjoyed walking on new sets, seeing what the technicians had come up with. I loved studio work. The magic of moviemaking, how those worlds were created.

  On July 2, just before Porgy and Bess was to start shooting, somebody left a cigarette burning on the set. Fire broke out. Stage 8, the second largest soundstage in Hollywood, was destroyed, and with it, thirty years of props and costumes, including Irene Sharaff’s costumes for the film. The Goldwyn studio was in a state of chaos.

  Marilyn flew into Los Angeles on Tuesday, July 8. The talk around town was that she was washed up. The exhibitors and fan magazine polls in late 1957 had showed Liz Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, and Natalie Wood as top box-office draws. Marilyn hadn’t even placed. As I later found out, there’s nothing Hollywood enjoys more than a falling star. It likes to put stars on a pedestal. It loves to pull them down. This was evident from the press Marilyn got while we were making Some Like It Hot. Every article acknowledged her star status, and every article made cracks.

  “Marilyn Monroe gloriously preserved her reputation for late arrivals yesterday,” wrote Jack Smith in the Los Angeles Times. “She did the seemingly impossible by arriving half an hour late aboard a Trans World Airlines plane that was on time.” I’m sure Marilyn could sense the hostility in the journalists and photographers waiting outside her plane at seven in the morning. They made no secret of it. “She’s taking longer than that duck-billed platypus,” said one reporter loudly, referring to the creature that had recently been flown to the Bronx Zoo.

  When Marilyn finally emerged from the plane, sounds of adulation rose from the waiting crowd. “Monroe is the only star that the fans will get up this early to come and see,” observed an airport guard who was busy holding them back. A cyclone fence stretched with the pressure of another group, airline mechanics who made approving noises at the sight of Marilyn. “Breathing deeply and licking her lips, Miss Monroe fluttered thick black eyelashes at a row
of grease monkeys,” wrote Smith. “Then, white hair aswirl in the propwash of another plane; white silk shirt open at the powdered white throat; white, tight silk skirt, white shoes, white gloves, Marilyn Monroe blinked big, sleepy eyes at the world. She brushed a hank of white hair from her forehead and began descending—slowly and wickedly—down the steps.”

  Reporters commented on Marilyn’s new hair color. It was no longer gold, but platinum. “It’s White Blonde,” she explained. “That’s what I call it. I had it done about a week ago for my new picture.” Reporters shouted questions about Some Like It Hot. What was it about? What did she play? “I haven’t read the script yet,” she answered. “But I trust Billy Wilder completely.” Smith also commented on Marilyn’s figure. “Miss Monroe took another step down the ladder and the white skirt stretched tight as a drumhead over her ample hips.” Yes, said Marilyn, she may have put on just a little weight. “It’s still in the right places, isn’t it?” she asked. She did not explain that moodiness caused her to lie in bed all day, imbibing champagne and ingesting chocolate. “I’ll be in good shape in two weeks. I intend to do lots of walking and exercising.” She said that Arthur Miller had stayed behind to work on his play. Was he writing a part for her in it? “Who knows?” she answered.

  A limousine took Marilyn to the Bel Air Hotel, where she would live while we were making Some Like It Hot. I was preparing for my first public appearance in connection with the movie. A “press reception” (not to be confused with a press conference) was scheduled for five thirty that afternoon. Billy had been working with the public relations firm of Rogers and Cowan to make sure that the picture would be presented properly, or, as now they say about a product, “positioned.” There had never been a big-budget comedy with female impersonators before, so it had to be handled just right. A press reception was the first step. Jack Lemmon wouldn’t be there. He was in Chester, Connecticut, making a movie with Doris Day.