by Tony Curtis
After the joke, when Billy was filming the scene, Eddie Jr. came out of the cake and started shooting with the machine gun. He was a small guy, so the machine gun kind of took him over. He shot too wide. And Billy yelled, “Cut! Cut!” Eddie stopped. “What are you doing?” Billy asked him. “You’re not going to kill the whole table, just those four men.”
Jack and I were hiding under the table during this scene, but we weren’t there when the wide angle was made. Our shots were done later, with the camera on the floor. Sometimes for a scene like that, the director builds a platform so that a low angle can be shot at eye level. We were already a few days behind schedule, though, so Billy just shot it on the floor even though his back was starting to bother him and he had to lie on his stomach to direct us.
The last complete scene we shot that week was the one where I’m returning from my date with Marilyn. I climb through the window of the hotel room Jack and I are sharing. Jack is lying on the bed, still in drag, holding a pair of maracas. The scene was a tricky one. On the one hand it showed the depth of the friendship these men have. They’re excited to tell each other about a conquest. On the other hand, Jerry is getting carried away with the role he’s playing. It scares Joe. We had to play it very deftly. There was no precedent for this in a Hollywood movie.
“Billy handed me a set of maracas,” recalled Jack. “I thought he was crazy. I’d already worked out everything at home and I could not imagine what I was supposed to do with those things. As we began rehearsing it hit me. The maracas served as a bridge, a piece of business that would fill the gap between my lines.”
Billy anticipated that the things Jerry blurts out to Joe would affect the audience so viscerally that, as in the case of Ninotchka twenty years earlier, the laughter would wipe out the next two lines of dialogue. “In the theater,” said Billy, “you can wait until the laugh is over, but in film you have to guess.” Jack’s line “I’m engaged to Osgood” would get them going, but they’d miss his lines about Niagara Falls and Osgood’s mother. “Every time I’d read a line,” said Jack, “I’d follow it by waltzing around with those maracas while Tony’s looking at me like I’m out of my mind.” Billy timed it so the audience wouldn’t miss the plot point. He’d be able to adjust it more precisely after the first preview.
At the end of the week, Marilyn reappeared. She seemed a little brighter, a little fresher. No one asked her what had happened. We just tried to get back into step. We started with the scene after the emergency brake, where she switches berths with me. Most of it was medium shots and not much business. She did fine. Billy decided that we were okay to go back to Coronado. We still had to do the day-for-night shots with the motor launch and the exterior of the hotel. On Sunday the twenty-eighth of September, they drove us down there. I didn’t see Marilyn until late that night. She was arriving with Arthur Miller. And May. And Paula. They all looked kind of dour. It didn’t bode well for the comedy scenes we had to do the next day.
21
On Monday September 29, Some Like It Hot went into its third month. I’d been on longer productions. They didn’t feel as long as this one. On that day Marilyn had a nine o’clock call. Billy Wilder needed to get more shots of her on the beach. The weather couldn’t have been nicer. It was going to be seventy-nine degrees. Arthur Miller would later claim that Billy had abused Marilyn by making her run along the pier in 104-degree heat. The weather that week, especially when we were shooting at the pier with the motor launch, never got higher than eighty.
I looked down from my hotel room around eight thirty and saw the crew setting up the reflectors and the scrims and the arc lights. About an hour later, I looked outside again. They’d brought in the camera and the sound console and the boom. Billy was there with the second assistant director, John Chulay, organizing the extras. There was a crowd gathering, too, and some security officers were walking around. Somebody in the hotel must have leaked the news that we were shooting again. Then I saw Sam Nelson, the first assistant director, walk up to Billy. They talked for a few minutes. Then they both left the beach.
I had a driver take me into San Diego to do some shopping. I’d promised Kelly I’d bring her something. It must have been about one p.m. when I got back to the hotel. The crowd was larger, but something was wrong. The lights weren’t on. I went upstairs and looked down from my room. They weren’t shooting. I figured maybe they’d gone to lunch, although it was a little late for that. I went back downstairs and looked around the lobby. Audrey Wilder was there. I asked her what was going on. She told me that Marilyn wouldn’t come to the beach. She was making excuses. First she was studying her lines. Then she was washing her hair. Paula Strasberg tried to get her to come. No dice. With all these delays, Charles Lang lost the angle of the sun that he needed to light Marilyn’s close-up. So everyone was taking a long lunch. Billy had hoped that having Marilyn stay at the hotel would make it easier to get her to the set on time. Not so. She left the entire company waiting on the beach. “We got wonderful suntans while we were waiting for her,” said Billy.
Finally, at two thirty, Marilyn came to the beach. She was wearing her bathing suit and a bathing cap. A security guard was walking on either side of her. The crowd started buzzing. The arc lights came on. Billy got a shot of her running from the water with Jack. Then they set up for her close-ups. Marilyn walked over to a roped-off area where there was shade from a small building. Paula was sitting in a beach chair next to Arthur Miller. She was in black, natch, but he looked more sporty than usual. He had on a striped golf shirt and an air force fatigue cap. Marilyn made him get up and give her his chair. Then she had him bring her a glass of water. You’d think she’d have had an assistant do that instead of making one of America’s most important writers into a gofer. I found it embarrassing to watch. Imagine how he felt.
When I did my own stunts, Billy paid me a compliment. He compared me to Bill Holden, who’d been so athletic in Sabrina.
I felt that the crew was overly concerned about Marilyn’s safety in this scene. She wasn’t going to fall into the water. She wasn’t that dizzy.
Marilyn disliked the image of the dumb blonde that Twentieth Century-Fox had sold the public. In real life she was anything but dumb. She and I communicated on many levels: intellectual, spiritual, and physical.
This famous photo shows you how an intimate scene is shot—with fifty people present. And that’s just the crew. There were also hundreds of local people watching us.
At one point during the filming of Some Like It Hot, a joke circulated. “What does M. M. stand for? Missing Monroe.” Here I am, waiting for her to be located.
When the shot was ready and they pulled the stand-in, they had to send John over to Marilyn twice before she came and took her position. Then she started in with that hand-shaking routine. Billy did a camera rehearsal. They had to quiet the crowd. Then it was “Action.” Marilyn couldn’t remember one simple line of dialogue. “Cut.”
“What did I do wrong?” asked Marilyn.
Billy read the line to her. She shook her head and looked down. “Action.” Marilyn got the line out but looked the wrong way while saying it. In movie parlance, she crossed the stage line. “Cut.”
“What did I do wrong?”
“Keep your eyes here. All right. Again. Action.” This time she got the line, looked in the right screen direction, but there was no feeling in her voice. “Cut.”
“What did I do wrong?”
“That was great, but let’s try it once more.”
“But what did I do wrong?”
Billy came in close and talked with her very quietly so that no one could hear. She nodded. Then he went back to the camera and they continued. This went on for sixty takes. Sixty.
Later, when Marilyn was resting between Paula and Miller, Audrey walked over and chatted with them. I knew she was inviting them to have drinks with Jack, Billy, and me at the hotel. The day’s shooting wrapped in another hour. Marilyn walked to the hotel with Paula, Miller, and tw
o guards. A hundred people trailed behind them. Paula touched Marilyn on the shoulder every so often to let her know she was behind her. The sun was, too, so she wasn’t holding the umbrella over her as she usually did. Miller was wearing a fixed grin. It wasn’t convincing. “There were days I could have strangled Marilyn,” Billy said later. “There were wonderful days, too, when we all knew she was brilliant. But with Arthur Miller it all seemed sour. In meeting him, I at last met someone who resented Marilyn more than I did.”
I got dressed for our get-together and went down to join Audrey and the rest of them. Neither Marilyn nor Arthur Miller was there. I asked Audrey what had happened. She said she’d gone to fetch Marilyn. Seems she and Miller weren’t staying in the hotel. They were staying in a separate bungalow on the grounds of the Hotel del Coronado. “Pretentious,” said Audrey. Cautious, I thought to myself. Anyway, Marilyn had been on her way with Audrey when Miller pulled up alongside them in a car and nodded to Marilyn. Audrey naturally had asked if Miller was coming, too. “No,” said Marilyn. “I have to go.” She got into Miller’s car and off they went. Without saying good-bye, go to hell, nothing. Can you beat it?
The next day I was working with Marilyn. We were shooting the scene where I drop her off at the front door of the hotel after our date on the yacht. It was supposed to take place in the hours before dawn, so we were shooting on the shaded side of the building. There were lights and reflectors and everything, but the film would be “printed down” later to look like night. This was the first time I saw Marilyn wearing the white beaded gown that Orry-Kelly had designed for her. One word: wow. She had a fox stole over it, but you could see the contours of her breasts. I tried not to be obvious about it because Miller was standing on the sidelines.
Since Marilyn had been out of the hospital, she was different. She’d had her problems before, but we’d gotten the work done. She’d been friendly and chatty and available, even if she was a little distant at times. Not now. She wasn’t around much. We didn’t see her. It was obvious why. Miller didn’t want us to see her. And he didn’t want her to see us. Maybe he was afraid she’d get distracted or become infatuated with somebody.
Miller would greet me in funny ways. Odd ways. There was always a little superiority, a little hostility. To tell you the truth, he scared the shit out of me. For a while I was wondering if maybe Marilyn had blown the whistle on me. Maybe she’d told him what happened between us in the old days. Maybe she’d told him what happened in the hotel three weeks before. I couldn’t be sure. I watched myself around him. And I watched Marilyn. But she kept to herself. She kept away, except when we were thrown together by the script and had to kiss each other good night in front of a hundred people.
The scene ends with Sugar going inside and Joe climbing the facade of the hotel to get back into the room he’s sharing with Jerry. Billy had engaged a stuntman to do this. It would have meant cutting away from me after my scene with Marilyn. I suggested that Billy simply pan with me.
“Why don’t you have me climb up to the balcony?”
“No, no,” said Billy. “We can’t do that. Insurance. We’ve hired a fellow to do it for you.”
“Let me show you what I can do.”
Before he could say anything more, I dashed across the veranda, leaped onto the facade of the hotel, and climbed up to the balcony. And back down again. They didn’t have to use the stunt guy.
The next morning, when the sun was on the front of building, we shot the scene where the band arrives at the hotel in the shuttle bus. Because the camera was getting a wider angle, they cleared the area. It was a simple shot. Marilyn and I had to get off the bus and go up the stairs, exchanging a couple of lines. Jack was carrying our stuff, the poor guy. Billy shot several angles. Each one was difficult, not because of the content of the shot, but because of Marilyn.
First she rehearsed with us. Then she went over to Miller and Paula. They huddled and whispered. Paula touched Marilyn. Then Marilyn smiled gratefully and went back to her position. She stood there for a minute, closed her eyes, and shook her hands at the wrists. Then when she was in position, Floyd McCarty tried to get a few shots of her. United Artists needed photographs to begin selling the picture, as many as possible. Marilyn turned at the sound of the camera shutter. She gave Billy a pleading look. He looked around. “I don’t want to hear any cameras clicking,” he shouted. Floyd had to stop. Then, just as Marilyn was ready for a take, she heard a navy jet taking off. She closed her eyes as if she were in pain. She had to wait. Floyd started shooting again.
“No pictures,” she frowned at him. “No pictures.” The poor guy was just trying to do his job. But he had to stop. Marilyn had spoken.
I went to Billy and Audrey’s suite Thursday night. He was being interviewed. Lloyd Shearer, the journalist, had been watching Marilyn all week. He said that he found her lacking.
“No poise, no stage presence, no savoir faire,” he told Billy.
“She’s something of a product, isn’t she? Manufactured. She has a pleasing personality, but it’s the marketing professionals who have made her. She isn’t a natural actress. I’ve watched you. You have the patience of a saint. Is she worth it?”
“I’ll tell you,” answered Billy. “She may have no respect for time. She may get sick frequently. She may insist upon bringing along her drama teacher. She may hold up production. But when you finally get her in front of a camera, she has a certain indefinable magic which no other actress in this business has.”
“But surely she’s not the only star you could cast in this film.”
“I have an aunt in Vienna,” smiled Billy. “She, too, is an actress. Her name is Mildred Lachen-Faber. She always comes to the set on time. She knows her lines perfectly. She never gives anyone the slightest trouble. At the box office she is worth fourteen cents. Do you get my point?”
After the interview, Billy asked me how I was doing.
“I’m having trouble sleeping,” I told him.
“I’m sleeping better,” he said.
“You are? How?”
Billy reached into his pocket and pulled out a box of French suppositories. He dropped four in the palm of my hand.
“What? I should use all of them?”
“No. Just one.”
“It won’t help.”
“Slip one in your tuchis and you’ll sleep all night. Try it.”
So I did.
The next morning I came to the set. Billy asked me how the suppository worked. “I tossed and turned all night. But my ass fell asleep immediately.”
I wanted to be rested. I had to leap from a pier and drive a motor launch backward without crashing into a yacht. Because of the way Billy had set up the shot, I had to do it myself. This was when I started to wonder where I stood with Billy and the company. I was starting to feel like I wasn’t that important. If I got a tricky scene with lots of dialogue and business right, everybody was happy. But not as happy as they were for Jack. Or, my God, for Marilyn. That favoritism hurt me. When Marilyn got into that motor launch, they had a lot of guys standing alongside in case she fell in the water. They were overprotective of her but careless about me. That got to me.
Jack was watching all of this, but it didn’t rattle him. He was a consummate performer. There wasn’t much that could shake Jack from the continuity of the character he was playing. Billy didn’t let anyone bother Jack. He wanted Jack to be left alone so he could get in there and do his job.
I, on the other hand, had a difficult time. I wasn’t sure what I should do. I wasn’t getting help from Marilyn. And Billy was spending all of his time worrying about her. I wanted to do my part. I wanted to allow myself that electricity that I’ve got, the speed with which I work. For example, that scene climbing the balcony. And the scene where I leap from the pier. Billy liked that. “Bill Holden was the best guy for stunts until you came along,” he said to me afterward. Well, hearing him say that knocked me out—to get a compliment like that from Billy Wilder.
; Of course there were other times when he complimented me. “I like what you’re doing,” he’d say quietly after a take. And Audrey would tell me over drinks at night, “Billy likes you very much.” But he never talked about me the way he talked about Jack or Marilyn. I heard those things, and I read them. That weekend there was an article in This Week magazine. Billy was quoted in it. “There are very few leading ladies in the business today,” he said. “Of the few, there is just one Marilyn Monroe. People go for her. She has a style that is all her own.” In spite of everything that was happening, I had to agree with that.
Part V
The Problems
22
On Monday, October 6, we were back at the Goldwyn studio, shooting on the sets of the hotel interior. Most of these scenes included Marilyn. At nine a.m. Billy took Jack and me aside. “Now listen, guys,” said Billy. “You’d better get it right from the first take. Get it right every time. Because the first time she gets it right, I’m printing it. I don’t care if you’ve got a finger in some orifice. That’s the take I’m printing.”