The Making of Some Like It Hot

by Tony Curtis

  “Yeah.”

  “Sound okay?” he asked the recorder.

  “Yeah.”

  “All right,” said Billy. “That’s it. Print it. Next setup.”

  “Oh, boy,” said Marilyn. She was incredulous.

  Grace Lee Whitney played a member of the band. She later became known for her work in the Star Trek series.

  Here’s a photo of me with the girls who played the band members. I remember them fondly.

  This photo shows me and Billy talking to Grace, possibly about baseball, since the Dodgers were playing their first season in Los Angeles that year.

  This photo shows me camping it up with Joan Shawlee, who played the bandleader. Joan had her own comedy club in the San Fernando Valley.

  This is what’s called a gag shot. The unit still photographer—in this case, Floyd McCarty—had to get a certain number of these during production. The newspapers loved to run pictures like these.

  I wish I could recall what Joan was telling me when Floyd took this photo. I’m sure it was something funny (and dirty).

  Here is a photo of Jack filming a very important close-up, the one that reminds the audience that he’s a man.

  Here’s a gag shot of me out of drag and Jack in drag. The odd thing is that Walter Mirisch, our producer, is also in the shot.

  In real life Jack and I didn’t need to be reminded that we were men. Not in that company.

  Moviemaking entails a lot of waiting. You get through it as best you can. Here you see me with George Raft and Billy Wilder.

  Here’s a shot of our speakeasy scene. Pat O’Brien is in the foreground. Jack Lemmon and I are on the stage behind the chorus girls.

  Jack and I were a great team. He never played the prima donna.

  “Are you kidding?” asked Jack. “Everything was okay?”

  “Yes,” said Billy.

  “No more takes? No other angles?”

  “No,” answered Billy. “You were both wonderful. Everything was terrific.”

  Marilyn took off while Billy shot a scene of Jack. “Billy made a closeup of me peering out from the upper berth,” Jack remembered. “I had my face cupped in my hands and I was ogling the girls. Billy had played everything loose up to that point. This closeup reminded the audience that despite the female getup, this character was, after all, a man.”

  There was a tall, thin gentleman on the set all the time. Billy introduced him to us as Doane Harrison, his associate producer. He’d been with Billy as a film editor when he directed his first film. “He was a great help,” said Billy. “He showed me in my first pictures where I should put the camera, where it would go, and where I should cut.” Billy saved a lot of time by not shooting angles he wouldn’t use later. It saved wear and tear on two guys in drag.

  The next sequence had the girls piling, one by one, into the upper berth to join the impromptu party with Jack and Marilyn. While the shot was being lit, Marilyn didn’t go to her dressing room. She sat on the edge of the berth with her legs hanging down. A journalist from the Los Angeles Times walked up. He was an older fellow named Philip Scheuer. I’d seen him around for years. He watched Marilyn as she started doing an odd thing. She extended her arms and began shaking her hands at the wrists. Then she put one thumb into the heel of the opposite hand and kneaded it. Then she started wringing her hands, quite forcefully.

  “Is something worrying you?” Scheuer asked.

  “Oh, no,” replied Marilyn. “This is part of the Method. It relaxes me before I go into the scene.”

  “I see.”

  As Scheuer walked away, Marilyn resumed the exercise, but much more vigorously. Because she was perched on the edge of the berth, her balance was a little precarious. She closed her eyes and shook her hands violently. Sure enough, she lost her balance and started to fall. Luckily, one of the grips was there to catch her.

  I had a bit of business where I popped my head out of the lower berth and tried to find out what the hell was going on in the upper. All I could see were a bunch of girls’ legs sticking out of the curtains. Billy had me rehearse it. I got a little adventurous. Instead of pushing one pair of legs aside to look for Jack, I spread the girl’s legs wide open. I forget who it was. Maybe Sandy Warner. I thought I was being cute. Billy didn’t. “What if she wasn’t wearing drawers?” he snapped at me. “You have to be orderly to shoot disorder.” I was properly chastised.

  The next scene I did with Marilyn was the one where Sugar is chopping ice in the ladies’ lounge. In it, she tells Josephine (Joe) a lot about herself. It makes us care about Sugar. For all her ditziness, she’s a trusting, vulnerable girl. Billy shot the master and then came in for a closer angle. Marilyn started having a little trouble with her lines. Billy had me drop a couple of the short lines that Josephine says in response to Sugar. This helped Marilyn get through the scene, and we finished that angle in about five takes. Then we shot my close-ups and Marilyn went to her dressing room. When I was finished, I went to my dressing room. I saw Paula coming out of Marilyn’s. If she couldn’t coach Marilyn in front of Billy, she was going to do it in Marilyn’s dressing room. In a while, Marilyn went back to the set and did her close-ups.

  I sensed that Marilyn felt torn between Paula and Billy. Her way of dealing with this conflict was to act. Big surprise. She was an actress, right? Well, take it from me, an actor: there are various types of acting. This was role playing. Marilyn thought she had to give each person what he or she wanted. She wasn’t strong enough to say, this is who I am; take it or leave it. No. As famous and powerful as she was, she just wasn’t strong enough. So she played the ding-dong for Paula, and she played the diva for Billy. That’s how Marilyn was wired. I know she wasn’t being difficult with Billy because of temperament. She truly wanted to do her best. But Billy came to represent a father figure for her. And that was complicated. She needed his approval and at the same time she resented needing it. There was no way that either of them could win with that kind of stuff going on. But they tried.

  Everyone could see that Marilyn had an incredible gift. She was a first-rate comedienne. The way she paused and made little facial movements in the scene we did that day brought so much to those lines of dialogue. This girl is talking about herself almost apologetically. She thinks she’s dumb, yet her sense of humor about it and her earnestness tell us that she’s not. And the way she whacks at that ice indicates her inner strength. Marilyn made you feel that she really was Sugar, and you got an impression that there was a whole life behind her. It was lovely watching her do her scenes. As I said before, there’s magic in making movies. This was part of it, watching Marilyn.

  17

  Our sixth week of shooting took us on location. The script described a Florida resort hotel called the Seminole-Ritz. By 1958 most of the gingerbread hotels in Florida had been torn down, so Billy had to shoot in Southern California. He chose the Hotel del Coronado, a Victorian beach resort that opened in 1888. It’s about three hours south of Hollywood, in the city of Coronado, which is on a peninsula across the bay from San Diego. Charles Lang’s cinematography made the white structure sparkle in the ocean air. We were using it only for exterior shots, though. Sets representing the hotel interior were being built at Goldwyn. On Monday, September 8, we took over the beach front. The first scene called for Marilyn and the girl musicians to cavort in the waves.

  Word had spread through Coronado and San Diego that we’d be shooting on the beach, so Billy hired bodyguards for Marilyn and security guards to keep the gawkers out of camera range. There were hundreds of them. The idea of three movie stars in the open air was too much to resist. The press showed up, too.

  When Marilyn ran into the ocean with the girls and then emerged dripping wet, her bathing suit, dark and loose-fitting though it was, clung to her. There were remarks. One of them came from Billy. He asked Marilyn if she’d consider losing a few pounds.

  “You want your audience to be able to distinguish me from Tony and Jack, don’t you?” she answered. “An
d besides, my husband likes me plump.”

  Lang put up a fine black net on a frame so that the sunlight wouldn’t overexpose Marilyn’s hair. At this point its color was close to platinum. This “scrim” worked fine, and it helped keep people away. When it was time to record dialogue, Marilyn turned to the crowd, held up her hands, and asked them to keep quiet. You’d have thought it was Eleanor Roosevelt. They settled right down. Then Marilyn went into her Method ritual. She looked at Paula, who was sitting on the beach, still dressed in black and still carrying that umbrella. Marilyn closed her eyes and shook her hands at the wrists for a couple of minutes. There were whispered comments after the scene was shot.

  “She looks like she’s trying to dislocate her hands from her wrists.”

  “She seems scared stiff. Like this was her first picture.”

  “She’s gotten fat. Maybe she’s pregnant.”

  Marilyn walked over to Paula and chatted with her. A few minutes later, she did it again. And then again. “Why does she have to talk to her drama coach after every line?” asked an onlooker. “Do other actresses do the same thing?” Paula was making her influence felt, even if she was staying out of Billy’s sight line. But she made sure to curry favor with him. “I’ve asked Marilyn not to talk to me on the set,” she dissembled. “I’m only here because she feels insecure.” From the way they huddled, Marilyn must have been awfully insecure.

  The shots of Jack throwing a beach ball with Marilyn and the girls took most of the first day. On Tuesday, it was time for me to come onto the beach. Unlike Jack, I was not in drag. I was wearing a new costume because I was playing a new character. Some Like It Hot calls for Joe to have three identities. Joe the saxophone player is a peacock—opportunistic, gambling, and womanizing. Josephine, his drag persona, is a lady—sophisticated, reserved, and wary of men. Mr. Shell Oil Jr., the persona he assumes to woo Sugar, is a millionaire—privileged, sheltered, ineffectual. Playing these diverse characters required me to divide myself in three. I had to find components of these characters in my own experience. It was a challenge, but I did it, and I found it tremendously rewarding.

  During rehearsals, Billy said to me, “When you dress like a millionaire and you begin your relation with Marilyn, you’ll need to speak differently. You can’t speak like a musician from Brooklyn. What kind of an accent can you do? Can you do a Boston accent? Or mid-Atlantic?”

  This kind of bothered me. It shouldn’t have, because Billy was talking about a character, not me, but it touched a nerve. After ten years in Hollywood, I was still self-conscious about my New York accent. Much had been made of it in previous years. When I appeared in one of my first hits, Son of Ali Baba, I had a line of dialogue that went, “Yonder in the valley of the sun is my father’s castle.” Some low-minded people seized on it and told the world that I had said, “Yondah lies the castle of my faddah.” I was sensitive about coming from New York and being Jewish. When people laughed at that alleged line reading, they were putting down not only me but also my Jewish brothers and sisters. If you’re a British actor who went to Eton, you can play a Roman emperor or a Boston Brahmin. If you’re an American who went to P.S. 82, you cannot play a distinguished character. It’s surprising where you find bigotry. And sad.

  I thought about Billy’s question. How would Joe want his new image to sound? Whose accent did I admire? Cary Grant’s. After I saw him play a submarine commander in Destination Tokyo, I volunteered for the submarine service. Could I do a Cary Grant accent? I’d been doing that since I was a teenager.

  In the scene with Sugar on the beach, I’m wearing the cap, glasses, and blazer I’ve stolen from Mr. Beinstock, the band manager. I chase a defenseless child away from a wicker sun chair and his sea-shell collection. When Sugar walks by, I trip her. Who says comedy isn’t fundamentally mean? After she collects herself and I apologize, she hears me. My voice is so different from Josephine—and Joe—that she doesn’t recognize me. No one would.

  I started with a Cary Grant accent and then I exaggerated it. I pitched the timbre of my voice a bit higher, made the accent saucy, and played with the endings of words. I extended them, made them longaaah. I didn’t swallow the g. The British do that. I figured this guy wouldn’t be smooth enough to get that. But he would emphasize the “gaaah.” He’d sound not mid-Atlantic, but “mixed Atlantic.” Like a charlatan. I’d met plenty of those outside the soundstages. Always dropping names, trying to sell you something. I knew the type. So I said the line—with the accent.

  “Cut.”

  “Was that all right, Billy?’

  “Great.”

  “But the accent?”

  “What accent?

  “Billy, I was doing a little bit of Cary Grant.”

  “If I had wanted Cary Grant to play the part, I would have gotten Cary Grant.”

  That was Billy. He couldn’t countenance something he hadn’t thought of. But he didn’t tell me to stop. I would have liked a little encouragement. That wasn’t Billy. It made me feel insecure.

  After Sugar meets me and runs off, the script has me say, “So long.” I suggested to Billy that it would be more in character for Joe to make Junior say “Cheerio!” That would be his concept of a rich guy. I was surprised that Billy let me change the line. He treated his scripts like the Bible. No one was allowed to change even a single line of dialogue. I remember the scene in Poliakoff’s office, the agency where Jack and I are scrounging for work. Jack got excited, and after finishing a speech with the line “Now you’re talkin’ ” he repeated the line. Billy froze. “That’s not how the speech reads,” he said. Jack pleaded. It felt right to him to say the line twice. Billy walked over to Izzy, who was sitting a short distance away. They started talking in low tones. This went on for close to half an hour. He finally came back to us. “Okay, you can repeat it,” he said solemnly.

  Billy wasn’t picking on Jack. Billy didn’t let himself change dialogue. He and Izzy sweated over every line, every cadence, every nuance. Izzy would add one word at the beginning of a sentence, such as and, just to make the sentence sound better, to balance it. This craftsmanship is what makes their pictures great.

  The scene on the beach had to be shot in long takes. There were jets taking off from a naval base nearby. They made a racket every ten minutes or so. So Billy needed us to do our three-minute scene within those ten-minute intervals. Uninterrupted. Marilyn wasn’t used to this kind of imperative, you might say. As vulnerable as she was, she was also spoiled. But Marilyn or no, those jets were taking off. So she had to adapt herself to the circumstances. They weren’t going to adapt themselves to her.

  Billy rehearsed us and quickly shot the scene. Marilyn got every word right in the first take. Billy said, “Cut. Print it.” You should have seen the look on Marilyn’s face. She couldn’t believe it. For a second I thought she was going to faint. But no. She shook her head and scampered over to Paula, who handed her the umbrella. It wasn’t hot that day, but the sun was bright. Marilyn looked kind of pale under the makeup. We didn’t want her to get sunburned.

  The sun was sinking. Charles Lang wanted to shoot Marilyn’s close-ups with the sun backlighting her, but not so low that it shone into his lens. It was too late. Billy called it a day. We went back to the hotel. Marilyn walked there with Paula and two big guards. Her fans clapped as she walked by. She smiled at them. I got my share of attention, too. I loved it. I still do.

  I never thought of acting in movies as the ultimate way of earning a living. But it became that. I got caught in that whirlpool of ambition. I wanted to be a star. I wanted everything that fame had to offer. But I learned there was more than that to being a star. I found that people were getting something from me that they didn’t get elsewhere. Maybe there was something missing from their lives. I’m not sure. But I felt the affection, the warmth. Anywhere I went, I generated that excitement. I still do when I make a public appearance now. It’s great to feel that I’ve given something to these people. But what? That quality I had. I guess
I was born with it. It got me to Hollywood. But I give myself credit for doing something with that quality. I studied and practiced and trained and worked until I got to a point where I’d refined it. I could communicate it to a camera. This was my dilemma. What was I communicating? Was it me? Was it something I’d learned? Was it some magical thing coming through me? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s the nature of the profession. Perhaps it’s the nature of human existence.

  18

  On Wednesday Marilyn and I shot the rest of the scene on the beach, including the part where Jack comes up and recognizes me. I loved the competition between our characters, rooted as it was in friendship and in the contrast of the guys’ personalities. The story was so well written and those characters were so well etched. I’ve often been asked if there was any competition between Jack and me.

  I had a great time working with Jack. What a sweet guy. There was never any question of competition. Never. Some actors cheat their angles, pitch their voices, do anything to make themselves look good—at your expense. Not Jack. He never played the prima donna. It was always teamwork for him. He was extremely well educated and wonderfully bright, but he never waved that Harvard background in my face. He was articulate, but he didn’t spend hours telling anecdotes on the set while I was trying to get into character. He respected my process. And he had his, too. He was very critical of himself, as if he was never satisfied with what he did. Sometimes he would get so quiet. I wasn’t sure what was going on. Then he’d explode into character. It was extraordinary to see.

  After Billy finished Jack’s shots, he worked on my close-ups. Then he called Marilyn back for hers. I watched for a while. Every so often I’d catch her looking at me and smiling. She was doing pretty well. Not too many mistakes. I started to feed her lines, and between takes we chatted. It was nice sitting there on the beach in the afternoon sun. She seemed relaxed. I looked behind me. Paula wasn’t there. I asked Marilyn how she liked the hotel. She was pleasant about it. Then she leaned forward and spoke to me in a lower tone of voice. “Come and see me tonight.”