The Making of Some Like It Hot

by Tony Curtis

  Between takes, Jack and I wore comfy slippers.

  Between takes, Marilyn retreated to her trailer or consulted with her husband, playwright Arthur Miller.

  An hour later we were ready to start again. Everybody was chatty and bubbly. It was a pleasant environment. The big doors of Stage 3 were open. It was a warm day as I recall. Then the limo pulled up. A chauffeur hopped out and opened the door for Marilyn. Miller stayed in the car. When Marilyn came through the big doors, the atmosphere changed. Everybody on that stage started to quiver. She had such a reputation. Even this early, no one knew what she was going to do from one minute to the next. They almost couldn’t believe she was making the picture.

  Miller came in later. I had a chance to watch him. He was kind of a strange guy. He looked like Abraham Lincoln. But then all of Marilyn’s husbands did. I guess she figured they knew something she didn’t. But Miller was quiet that afternoon, almost glum. The stage was quiet.

  The next day was a different story. Everyone in the western hemisphere had found out that Marilyn was on the Goldwyn lot. Oh, boy. It was like the Oklahoma land rush. I had a hard time parking. The Formosa Café was full by eight in the morning. There were people in and out of Stage 3 all day. We were shooting on a larger set—the interior of the coach—so they could watch Marilyn sing “Runnin’ Wild” to playback. I think they made her nervous because she had a had time matching her lips to the recording she’d made a few weeks back. But she didn’t tell the visitors to leave. Sometimes I saw her get huffy and do that, but not that day. As I say, with Marilyn you never knew.

  I saw Maureen Stapleton on the edge of the set. She was shooting a picture called Lonelyhearts on the lot. “I could watch Marilyn all day,” Maureen said. “She’s wonderful.” Montgomery Clift was in the same picture. He watched us for a while, too. He whispered to somebody, “I just want to look for a minute.” He stayed for an hour. A reporter named Joe Hyams talked to Marilyn between takes. Like most of the press, he had this notion that Marilyn was making a comeback. I mean, what were they thinking? She wasn’t Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. But people were talking like she was from another century. My God, she was thirty-two. She’d become a star only four years earlier. I’m sure her last picture was still in release somewhere. Yet I heard this guy ask her about the difference between her and “today’s new stars.” I’m surprised he didn’t ask her what making silent pictures was like. “I think a person is made up of a lot of things,” Marilyn answered him. “As soon as you start nailing it down, you get nowhere.” Ask a silly question and you get a silly answer.

  Then Hyams went over and crouched on the floor next to the canvas-back chair where Paula Strasberg was sitting. And, oh, was she regal as she rolled her eyes to acknowledge him. He asked her about her work with Marilyn, but Paula could see that Billy had one ear turned in her direction, so she stuck to platitudes. “Marilyn is an extraordinary human being,” said Paula. The reporter scribbled this down, nodding in agreement. “I know there are many such people,” Paula intoned. “But in addition to this, Marilyn is a star. And she is one of the most gifted actresses in the world.” More scribbling. “You know, my daughter Susan says, ‘God put a finger on Marilyn.’ ” God’s finger notwithstanding, it took almost two days to film this short sequence. Marilyn was beginning to have problems.

  At the end of her song, Marilyn was supposed to inadvertently drop her hip flask. In the script, this causes Sweet Sue to turn sour and threaten Sugar with dismissal, but then Daphne pretends the hip flask is hers (his). Billy was shooting a medium shot of Marilyn so that the hip flask would hit the floor at the bottom of the frame. Then he could finish the shot because the scene would cut to a reverse angle of Sue. The business needed to finish the shot was not complicated, but it needed to be timed perfectly.

  Marilyn had to finish the song with her arms raised. She had to let the flask slip from under her arm and land at her feet. She had to look down at the flask. Then she had to flash a guilty look at her coworkers. For a pro like Marilyn, this should have been easy. She was an excellent physical actress. She understood that part of the business. Movement, balance, timing. Unfortunately she wasn’t coordinated. She’d had a hard time coming down the stairs in step with the other stars in There’s No Business Like Show Business. It wasn’t that she didn’t try or care. She just couldn’t get her limbs to cooperate.

  Instead of sailing through this flask business—one, two, three, four—Marilyn kept messing up the sequence. In one take, she finished the song without raising her arms. In the next take, she looked around before looking down at the flask, which made no sense. In the next take, she looked down before she dropped the flask, which gave away the punch line. In the next, she lost her balance as she finished the song and didn’t even get to the flask or the reaction. She couldn’t seem to manage the four elements of the shot. Not to mention that she’d been singing out of sync in most of the takes. It was a little unnerving.

  Billy kept his cool and worked with her, trying to reassure her. She tried again. And again.

  “You aren’t surprised enough, Marilyn,” said Billy.

  Marilyn took it again, looking more surprised but forgot to look around her.

  “Cut. You still haven’t got it, dear.”

  Marilyn looked around but couldn’t see Paula.

  “Don’t strain for it,” said Billy. “It’s a very simple reaction.”

  Marilyn made a kind of snorting sound and stepped out of her key light. She walked over to the side of the set. Paula was there, standing with Arthur Miller. Marilyn started whispering to Paula. Billy conferred with the script clerk and then with Charles Lang. Marilyn didn’t return. She stood talking with Paula. Five minutes stretched into ten, and ten into fifteen. Miller looked uncomfortable, as well he should have. He was in an awkward position. “Wilder’s embarrassment was tremendous,” he said later. “Wilder, as is any director, is the final authority on the set, the law. When a man is kept standing and waiting for half an hour, it’s a great humiliation.”

  Finally Marilyn went back to her place. She started the next take, and—sure enough—she blew it. Another take. Same thing. Jack and I weren’t entirely used to high heels. We were standing in this scene. Which meant that we were standing between takes, too. We couldn’t go sit in our chairs. We had to be ready for Marilyn’s moment. We were stuck. Well, I started to get cramps in my calves. I leaned on one of the carriage seats. “Tony and I suffered the tortures of the damned in those heels,” Jack said later. And we had to listen to that song over and over again. I heard “Runnin’ Wild” in my sleep for weeks afterward. Occupational hazard.

  The fact is that Marilyn never got the four things in a row in one take. By this time, Billy could see that everyone was losing his or her zip. He figured that he could do something in the editing or bring us back later, although this was supposed to be our last day on this particular set. Whatever he was thinking, he announced that there would be no more takes of this shot. All of a sudden, Marilyn perked up. “Billy,” she said. “Could we try it just once more?”

  No one dared to groan, but believe me, we wanted to. We did the shot one more time. She still didn’t get it right. Billy did, however, take one precaution. He shot a closer angle of the flask hitting the floor. Then he let us go.

  15

  The third and fourth weeks of shooting didn’t involve Marilyn. Jack Lemmon and I had to do the scenes that open the film. There was the scene in the speakeasy, the scene in the booking agent’s office, and the scenes with Pat O’Brien and George Raft. Working with men like O’Brien and Raft was a great experience for me. These were kings in their own right. They carried so much history with them. But they were down to earth. They were such good guys.

  I was learning a lot about Jack. Acting is a profession of movement, never-ending movement. Jack’s tempo was faster than that of most actors. He was superkinetic, like he didn’t want to get caught. He talked quickly and then suddenly changed speed. Or stopped
. This was a great way to emphasize something in a scene. It was so distinctive, so unusual. It became a trademark. It made him a popular leading man. Look at the women he’d worked with: Judy Holliday, Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth. These women had that extra gear that they would shift into, that made you watch them, that made them powerful. When you worked with them, you had to be prepared to move with them. Jack was doing that in Some Like It Hot; his energy propelling us at a whole different speed. He had a habit of saying a certain phrase when it was time for a scene. He’d say, “Magic time!” That was his mantra, I guess. Billy thought it was significant. He was impressed that Jack could capture the whole business of make-believe in two words.

  Jack didn’t connect with Billy right away. After two weeks, Felicia Farr asked how it was going, what Billy was like. Jack shrugged and said, “I guess he’s okay.” On the other hand, Billy confided to Izzy at one of their nighttime writing sessions that he was impressed by Jack’s inventiveness. Billy wanted to work with Jack again, which meant creating something for him. That’s how The Apartment came to be. Jack caught Billy’s fancy. I remember a party one night where Billy said that Jack might look ordinary, but that was his gift: to portray the ordinary in an extraordinary way. He later said that Jack was an artist who could paint the Everyman. Coming from an art collector like Billy, this was rare praise.

  Jack helped me improve my craft. And, of course, so did Billy. I was a quick study. I didn’t want to leave it to the last minute. But because of my nighttime ramblings, sometimes I did. So I’d come onto the set mouthing the material until we got to my sequence. I was always relieved when I got my dialogue right. Some actors would blow their lines. Not me. Still, Billy found occasion to rib me. He had a certain attitude, a certain style. I wouldn’t call it teasing. Provoking, maybe. He’d make little jokes. For example, when Jack and I were rehearsing a scene with him, Jack had already let go of his script. I was still holding mine. Why, I don’t know. I just did. Billy needled me about that. But he never left me out in the cold.

  Billy wouldn’t act out a scene for you the way some directors did. Or leave you alone, like most directors did. A lot of them were traffic cops. “Come in this door. Say your line. Go out that door.” That was it. They didn’t care how you did it as long as you got it done on time. But not Billy. He gave you enough direction to understand the importance of the scene. And of course he and Izzy had written it. How could you go wrong? Some Like It Hot did a lot for my development as an actor. It wasn’t enough for me to be a handsome actor, maybe the handsomest in town. It wasn’t enough to learn the lines and show up. Being around artists like Jack and Billy and Marilyn affected me. I wanted to know more. I wanted to get closer to the source of the art. I wanted to know how to create that magic, like stars did in the pictures I’d seen when I was a kid. But how do you get a formula for magic?

  I’ve heard it said that George Raft never gave a convincing line reading in his entire career. Maybe. Maybe not. But people wanted to watch him. And that’s what makes a star. I’ll say this for him. He was gracious all during the shooting. Billy and Izzy put an inside joke into the script. Edward G. Robinson Jr. is flipping a coin in front of George Raft, who asks him, “Where’d you pick up that stupid trick?” The joke was that George Raft’s first big role was in Scarface, where he played a gangster who has the habit of flipping a coin over and over. It made him famous. But the joke had another dimension.

  Howard Hawks had directed Scarface. He got the idea for the coin flipping from the great MGM producer Irving G. Thalberg, who used to do it absentmindedly while he thought up ideas for movies. Hawks’s wife was named Athole. Her sister was Norma Shearer, who was married to Thalberg. After Thalberg’s untimely death, Norma, who was still young, stayed single. Then she got serious about George Raft. Louis B. Mayer, the studio head, knew about George’s mob connections and told Norma to break up with him. Years later, when Norma was retired, she saw a picture of a pretty girl in a ski lodge and arranged for the girl to have an MGM screen test. The girl was Janet Leigh. I never met Norma, but Janet said she was a kind woman. All this Hollywood history brought me to a soundstage in Hollywood, making a picture that Billy described as a combination of Scarface and Charley’s Aunt.

  George Raft couldn’t do a scene the way Billy wanted it. An old character actor named George E. Stone was lying on the ground with a toothpick in his mouth. This was the scene where George has him rubbed out in a re-creation of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Billy wanted George to kick the toothpick out of George E.’s mouth. George E. was small, and, sorry to say, he was blind. George was uncomfortable about doing it. He didn’t think it was necessary or funny. It went against his nature. Billy kept after George. “Please, please, George! Kick the toothpick!” Finally George walked off. So Billy changed pants to match George’s and kicked George E. himself. He kicked him too close and too hard. They had to call an ambulance.

  The scenes we shot around the exterior of the speakeasy and on the streets of Chicago were done on standing sets at MGM. When we finished, we went back to Goldwyn to rehearse our Pullman-car scenes with Marilyn and the girls. I was sitting in a chair, watching all these blondes when Marilyn walked up to me. She had a mischievous look on her face. Apparently she’d seen me looking at the girls. By that time I was a “hell of an engineer,” like the old song says. She’d heard that.

  “Which one do you like?” she asked me.

  “Marilyn, don’t do this to me.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Pick one out.”

  “I don’t want to pick one out.”

  “Don’t you like any of them?”

  “Well,” I answered, “there are a couple there that are nice. Look, Marilyn. You know you’re the only one for me.”

  She laughed, but she kept this up through the whole picture. It was her little joke. Nothing came of it, even though the girls were respectful to her. In fact, they were a little afraid of her. I guess they wanted to feel that their jobs were secure. Marilyn was sweet to those girls. She didn’t have a lot of women friends. You couldn’t call May or Paula friends. But Marilyn went out of her way to make those girls comfortable. I would see them huddled off the set, whispering and giggling.

  Some girls would bring their boyfriends onto the set. I would watch them. The girls were wary. They were watching Marilyn to see what she would do. They thought she might pull their boyfriends away from them, just by using her magnetism. It got so that everything she did had some kind of significance. Regardless of polls or journalists, she was the biggest star of her time.

  16

  Monday, September 1, was Labor Day, so we didn’t work that day. On Tuesday and Wednesday we shot our scenes in the Pullman car. I was in the lower berth. The shenanigans with Jack, Marilyn, and the girls took place in the upper berth. The set was built so that each part would break away as needed, and it was built slightly larger than a real Pullman car so that lights and everything would fit. Billy shot my angles first, but I stayed to see how they did the party. I wasn’t the only one watching. A lot of people dropped in from other stages to gawk at Marilyn. Arthur Miller had gone back to New York by this time, but Paula Strasberg was there again. Some journalists were visiting, too. One of them asked Paula what she thought of our picture.

  “Everything is in such good taste,” she said. “It’s naive purity.”

  I guess she didn’t know that there was an office on the second floor of the Rexall Drug building on La Cienega and Beverly that worked five days a week making sure that movies were in “good taste”: the Production Code Administration. If those guys hadn’t approved the script, we wouldn’t be shooting. But Paula was a dilettante. She knew nothing.

  The same journalist came over to me and asked me about her. “I don’t know why she and Marilyn go into those huddles,” I said. “I guess she’s helping Marilyn read her lines or something. I never saw anybody else with a coach like that on the set.”

  Marilyn was doing well that week. She was on
time. She knew her lines. When I looked at her, she’d smile at me. When I went to my dressing room, I’d see that she was in hers. Sometimes I’d knock on her door.

  “Hello, Marilyn. It’s me.” I’d hear an answer. So I’d ask, “Do you mind if I come in for a few minutes? I just want to sit here quietly with you before they call us.”

  “Of course,” she’d say. “Please, sit down. Put your feet up on the hassock.”

  So I’d relax in there for ten or fifteen minutes while she studied her script. Sometimes—not often—we’d run lines. Usually she did that with Paula. But mostly I’d just sit there. That was it. We’d sit together until Billy called everybody. Then we’d come out. I treasured those quiet moments with Marilyn. They meant a lot to me. I could see she enjoyed them, too.

  When Marilyn and I did our scenes in the ladies’ lounge together, she began to look to me for support. If she was having trouble, she expected me to take her side. Her trouble became my trouble. If she felt there was too much commotion on the set, she’d look at me. I’d raise my voice. “Hey, fellas, can you keep it down? We’re trying to run lines here.” Once we were doing a scene and she looked at me, right in the middle of it, and said, “How’s my makeup?”

  “Looks good to me.”

  That wasn’t in the script, of course. Then she went back to her lines.

  Sometimes I’d come onto the set and see her in a canvas-back chair, the one with her name on it. We’d catch eyes, just like that, and keep looking. So much emotion would pass between us in those moments that I felt like I’d had a love affair with her before I even sat down.

  On Wednesday Billy started the day with a master shot of her and Jack in the upper berth. It was a fairly long scene. Marilyn and Jack were both letter-perfect.

  “Cut,” said Billy. He turned to Charles Lang. “Camera okay?”