American Prince

by Tony Curtis

  In 1954 I made the movie Beachhead, a very intense film about two American soldiers on a Japanese-occupied island during World War II. The movie was shot in Hawaii, and I had to go out there alone, which I didn’t like, but Janet was working too: she was filming the movie Prince Valiant. While I was in Hawaii, I got a phone call saying Janet had had a miscarriage. She was in the hospital and wanted me to fly back to LA.

  The news of her miscarriage was devastating, and not just for the obvious reason. I hadn’t even known Janet was pregnant! As I thought about it, my insecurity and my overactive imagination started wreaking havoc. Why hadn’t she told me she was pregnant? It was possible that she herself hadn’t known, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she was keeping it secret for some reason of her own.

  Our marriage wasn’t thriving by this point, as you may have guessed. Neither Janet nor I was the best of spouses, so we’d gotten pretty distant. All I knew was that I had finally attained my dream of being in the movies, but I kept being distracted by my personal life. I couldn’t believe how flimsy our relationship had become, but I stayed in it.

  After receiving news of the miscarriage, I had a decision to make: fly home or stay in Hawaii and keep filming. I wanted to fly home, but this particular movie was very low-budget, and I had to act in most of the remaining scenes. This meant that if I left, the studio would just shelve the movie rather than eating the extra production costs caused by the delay. Also, they told me there were only three or four more days of shooting. Once we were done, I could get on the first plane home.

  I talked to my agent, Jerry Gershwin of MCA, and he told me he was in touch with Janet and everything was under control. I still wasn’t sure what to do, so I called Janet in the hospital and told her my dilemma; she told me not to worry, that she’d be fine. I decided to stay and finish the movie, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by the thought of Janet in a hospital room.

  My costar in Beachhead was Frank Lovejoy, who played my lieutenant. Our job was to help a scientist and his daughter get safely across the occupied island, where a ship was waiting to take them to safety. The movie had lots of action. In it Frank’s character stops my character from having an affair with the scientist’s daughter, played by Mary Murphy. Mary was a very beautiful young woman who was dating Curt Fringes, a big-time agent who was about twenty years older than she was. Curt intended to divorce his wife Katy, a very powerful screenwriter, and marry Mary. Meantime, he was hell-bent on making Mary a star. While we were in Hawaii, Mary told me that she and Fringes were having problems; among other things, he wasn’t happy about the fact that another agent had gotten Mary her role in Beachhead, and that before Fringes even knew about it, she was on her way to Hawaii.

  Once Mary and I started talking, I became extremely attracted to her. She was very attentive and wanted to know all about me. While we were shooting the picture, we had fun connecting with each other with just a knowing glance or a shrug of the shoulders, and sometimes by stopping to talk. Though we both realized what was happening, neither one of us wanted to consummate the relationship. I didn’t want to do anything I would regret later; I didn’t want to jeopardize my already fragile marriage. It was a case of my eyes saying yes but the rest of me saying no. This was difficult for me, because saying yes was a helluva lot more fun. But it didn’t happen this time.

  The next picture offered to me was Johnny Dark, in which I played a brilliant but underappreciated car designer who designs a prototype that meets with disapproval from the owner of the car company (Sidney Blackmer). Don Taylor, who played Elizabeth Taylor’s husband in Father of the Bride, and I steal the car, aided and abetted by the company owner’s daughter (Piper Laurie) and we race it from Canada to Mexico. Johnny Dark wasn’t a bad movie, but by now I was looking forward to the day when my Universal contract would be satisfied and I would be free to pursue other possibilities.

  My next movie, The Black Shield of Falworth, starred Janet and me. I played a peasant who was really a king. It was reminiscent of my sand-and-tits movies, but this time we were decked out in armor instead of pantaloons, turbans, and scimitars. There was a lot of action for me in this picture. I learned to ride a horse really well, and I loved walking around in my shiny armor, which was actually made of plastic. I did some jousting and a lot of swordplay. Janet was upset because she, as a female, didn’t get to do anything physical. She played a lady-in-waiting, and she got so impatient with all that waiting that sometimes she’d jump on one of the horses and ride around to let off steam.

  Her unhappiness wasn’t due solely to the movie. Janet’s friend Barbara Rush was in the movie with us, and one day Barbara came up to me and asked, “Are you and Janet doing all right?” I had a feeling Janet had told Barbara we weren’t, and that Barbara had come to me to confirm it. I just said, “Janet’s not feeling well.” When the movie ended and Janet and I went home, I tried harder to behave in a way that didn’t anger her, and she made the same effort for me. We settled into a functional but unromantic marriage, the kind of life that was less unusual in Hollywood than you might think.

  We threw huge parties at our big, beautiful house on Summit Drive. Janet invited the Debbie Reynolds crowd, and friends such as Danny Kaye. Danny was a major talent. He was born in Brooklyn, and after coming to Hollywood he starred in roles where he could act, sing, and play the comedian, movies like The Court Jester, Merry Andrew, and Hans Christian Andersen. I didn’t care for Danny at all, but Janet and I had agreed that each of us could invite whomever we wanted.

  To my way of thinking, Danny was a very mean and bitter man, and most everybody seemed to agree with me. When we first met, he would belittle me all the time. He once asked me, “Where did you learn how to fence—the Bronx?” Another time he said to me, “How do you act in those high heels?” I said, “I don’t wear high heels.” Then I took a step closer to him, looked in his eyes, and smiled while I said, “Fuck you, Danny.” I don’t know why Danny had it in for me. Maybe it was because we both came from New York. Maybe it was because we were both Jewish, and he struggled with that in himself. Or it might have been some complicated sexual feeling.

  It was widely rumored that Danny went with both men and women. One of the people Danny was believed to have had a relationship with was Sir Laurence Olivier. There had always been rumors about Larry’s sexuality, but he was nothing like Danny. As it happened, I acted in one of Larry’s most famous scenes, in the movie Spartacus. The irony is that this famous—or infamous—scene didn’t see the light of day for thirty years after it was filmed, because it was deemed too racy for audiences at the time of the film’s release in 1960. In the scene, Larry plays a Roman general, and I’m his slave, and he’s sitting naked in a tub. The general is trying to get the slave to have sex with him, so Larry says to me, “Do you like oysters and snails?”

  I say, “I like oysters.”

  He says, “What about snails?”

  “No, I don’t like snails.”

  He says, “Well, I like both oysters and snails.”

  Live and let live. I don’t look down on gays; it’s just not my thing. George Cukor, one of the great directors, was part of the Hollywood gay crowd. George would throw a big, formal dinner party at his house. Then, after the party was over, George and his friends would go cruise Sunset Boulevard, looking for young men; they called them “after-dinner mints.” To each his own.

  When Janet and I threw our parties, her friends invariably outnumbered mine. That was fair. She had a lot more friends than I did. Sometimes Frank Sinatra would come join us, but you had to be careful not to push him. He never wanted to be forced into anything. You could ask him, and he might come, and he might not.

  To tell you the truth, I wasn’t that nuts about parties, but I realized that Janet’s social networking was good for both of us. At that point our faces were on every magazine cover in the country. When Janet and I hit, we became the undisputed darlings of the Hollywood media. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor? Forget it. Debb
ie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher? Not a chance.

  The public liked me because I was rough around the edges, not only in my acting but in my life. I was different from Cliff Robertson or Robert Wagner, who were always so polished and cool. I was untamed, with an animal magnetism that immediately attracted young fans of both sexes. At the same time, I was always very decent to people, and they liked that too.

  In Hollywood, working for the “right” studio gave you status. Actors like Janet, who were signed by MGM, had more status than anyone else. That was one reason Suzan Ball called me “Mr. Leigh”; Janet worked at glitzy MGM, while I was employed by low-rent Universal. And it was also true I was a Jew, which in those days was a strike against you in Hollywood—as it was in most places. So I had two strikes against me when I started. Despite those obstacles, I still managed to become a legitimate Hollywood phenomenon, which was fine with some people but made others unhappy; still others could go either way, depending on the situation. Debbie Reynolds was one of those people who seemed to blow cold, then hot, and then cold again.

  To be fair to Debbie, she started to treat me badly when she and Eddie Fisher started having problems in their marriage. It was a time when Debbie was very hostile toward men, sparking rumors that she was gay, but I never saw any evidence of that. People wondered about her sexuality because she never did settle down with a man other than Eddie. While they were married, I felt bad for Eddie. Debbie was a lot like Jerry Lewis, very demanding and always wanting to be in control.

  Debbie and Eddie had a daughter, Carrie Fisher (who became famous playing Princess Leia in Star Wars). Years after Eddie and Debbie divorced, Carrie would blame Eddie for her parents’ split, putting him in the category of “difficult Jewish fathers.” She put me in that class too. Carrie was angry at her father, much the way my daughter, Jamie Lee, would later be angry at me. According to Carrie, it was the fault of Jewish fathers when our marriages blew up.

  After Eddie and Debbie separated, his romantic life took a surprising turn. Liz Taylor had been married to producer Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash. Eddie was a good friend of Mike’s, and after Mike died, he started taking care of Elizabeth. One thing led to another. I found it strange that Elizabeth would allow Eddie to look after her, since I got the feeling she didn’t really care for him. Besides, she and Debbie were good friends. It was a strange time for all of us in our profession. You never knew who was going to end up with whom, or who would make it and who would fall by the wayside, personally and professionally.

  Janet, meanwhile, was becoming very critical of my behavior in public. We’d go to a party, and she’d watch me very carefully wherever we were. From a distance of fifteen feet, she would nod her head yes or no to approve or criticize the way I held my glass. She’d point to her own glass, and she’d mouth the words, Hold it like this. She was trying to teach me etiquette, and I began to resent it.

  One night Janet and I were invited to have dinner with Cole Porter at his New York City apartment. I had never met Cole, so I was looking forward to getting to know him. Ethel Merman, Janet, and I sat around Cole’s couch with him. He was remarkably genial and friendly. Then someone came to the door and said, “Dinner is served.” Everybody started to get up, so I just followed along. All of us walked down a little hallway, around a corner, and into the dining room; when we got there, Cole Porter was already sitting at the head of the table.

  I said to myself, How the hell did he get there so quickly? What I didn’t realize was that Cole couldn’t walk; both his legs had been broken in a horseback-riding accident. After the rest of us left him on the couch, two assistants had picked him up and hurried him through a back hallway and into the dining room before we could get there. I had always equated physical prowess with force of personality, but here was a guy who couldn’t walk yet still dominated a room with his presence. Cole forced me to reconsider some of my basic assumptions. He was a remarkable man.

  We all sat down and began the meal. I was sitting next to Janet, and I didn’t know which fork to use, whether to use the big spoon or the little spoon for soup, that sort of thing. My lack of sophistication bothered Janet, always the perfectionist. She began poking me and whispering to me, making sure I didn’t embarrass her with my inadequate manners. Her nagging pissed me off so much that I deliberately used the wrong knives and forks, which was childish but effective.

  As we were sitting there, Ethel Merman picked up one of the wineglasses and gently squeezed it at the top. The wineglass was so delicate, and her touch so assured, that she could change its shape from round to oval without breaking it. I picked up my glass to inspect it, and Ethel said to me, “Go on. Try it.”

  I squeezed, and this beautiful, delicate wineglass shattered in my hand. Ethel, who was dear and kind, said, “Don’t worry, kid, it could happen to any of us,” and then she took her own glass and shattered it just to make me feel better. I looked over at Cole, and he was laughing, but Janet was furious.

  One time after the wineglass incident, I went to La Grenouille, a famous French restaurant in New York, with my friend Gene Shacove and the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, who was staying at the same hotel I was, the Sherry-Netherland. I told them what had happened at Cole Porter’s house. Gene tried it with his glass and shattered it. Dalí wasn’t sure what we were doing, but he stood up in the restaurant, turned his glass upside down, and poured the wine onto his dinner; if we were somehow pushing the boundaries, Dalí wasn’t going to let us do it alone.

  There was so much about polite society that I just didn’t know. One time Janet and I were invited to go to the racetrack to see the quarterhorses run. I had never been to a racetrack, so I wasn’t sure what to wear. Janet said, “Just wear whatever you want.” I decided to wear jeans, but when I got there the other men were all looking snazzy in their sweaters and trousers, two-toned shoes, and felt hats. I wish I could tell you it didn’t matter to me, but the truth is that it made me feel inadequate. Those childhood wounds ran deep.

  Janet’s obvious discomfort with my manners and my New York accent didn’t do much for my insecurity. She wanted to change me into Laurence Olivier, whose charm and polish were legendary. That was never going to happen. I was always going to stand out in a crowd, for better or for worse. And as time went on I got a stronger and stronger feeling that Janet thought it was for worse.

  Janet and I had been nuts about each other when we first started going out. We loved the sex, and we loved the companionship; but it wasn’t long before the differences between us that had seemed so exciting at first started to create friction. In many ways, I was the naive one in the relationship. I had never been married before, but for Janet I was husband number three—and she had been only twenty-three years old! She had already lived a lot in that time, and she had developed very firm ideas about how everything should be. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before she started trying to change me to conform to those ideas.

  From my point of view Janet was bossing me around, just as my mother had bossed my father around. I could see signs in myself that I was becoming subservient, which only made my flashbacks to childhood more intense. Janet and I would go to a party together, and if I lit my cigarette without offering to light the cigarette of the person I was talking to, Janet would poke me with her elbow. She would always wait for me to introduce her to my friends, but I rarely did, because I never knew who she knew and who she didn’t. This upset her every time.

  She also had difficulty dealing with the attention that came with fame, whereas I enjoyed it. One time a studio hired a car to take us to a movie premiere at the Egyptian Theater in LA. When I got out of the car at the theater, screams erupted from the fans standing in the street. I reached into the car to help Janet out, and then we walked up to the entrance to the theater. On either side ropes kept the fans and the photographers from getting too close. The cameras were flashing, so I stopped to allow the photographers to take their shots. All the while, Janet was pulling on my arm to get me to go on in.
Then she gave me a shove, and when I still didn’t move, she pinched me in the back.

  I turned around and looked at her. With her teeth clenched she said, “Don’t stop and leave me out here like this. Get in there.” I looked her in the eye. She was furious.

  When we got home that night, I decided to ask her about the incident. She said, “Don’t ever do that again. How dare you embarrass me in front of all those people? You made me look like a fool. How dare you treat me like that?”

  When I look back on all the challenges we faced, what amazes me is not that Hollywood marriages fail at such an overwhelming rate; it’s that any survive at all.

  Getting the Girls to Scream

  Malibu Beach, 1953.

  Ihad a lot of good moments in my next movie, Six Bridges to Cross, a film about the Brinks armored car robbery in Boston. I played the ringleader who dies at the end of the movie. We went to Boston to film the exterior shots and shot the interiors at the Universal studio in LA. Sal Mineo played me as a kid.

  Sal, who was born in the Bronx, was a gifted actor who had started out at Warner Bros. playing with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Sal and I ended up being good friends. He was a good guy, and you could see he loved working in movies; like me, he felt privileged to get those jobs. But sadly, as he got older he soured because he was slight and boyish, so he always got the part of “the kid,” but he wanted bigger roles. The movie that made him a star was Exodus, a picture made by a big studio, United Artists, with a handsome budget. They weren’t trying to save money by hurrying the production, so Sal was able to develop his performance. In my Universal pictures, by contrast, the studio didn’t want character as much as it wanted action, romance, or adventure. Sal suffered a tragic end when he was stabbed to death in West Hollywood by a mugger who didn’t even know who Sal was.