by Tony Curtis
All this time my mother had never stopped harping at me to get my brother Robert into the movies. When I mentioned to her that an actor was going to play me as a boy in Six Bridges to Cross, she said, “You should get Robert to play that part. He’d be a natural. He’s your brother.” I don’t know what she was thinking. My brother was a schizophrenic, and you never knew what he would do next. But my mother was nothing if not persistent, so I mentioned it to the studio; they were kind enough to arrange to take pictures of him, but understandably they wouldn’t take the chance.
My mother blamed me, and piled on the guilt. She said, “You’re a big star at the studio. You should be able to get him the part.”
“It’s not up to me,” I said. Not that she heard me.
Sammy Davis Jr. sang a song in Six Bridges to Cross. In fact, he was driving to the studio to do some dubbing for the movie when he crashed his car and lost his eye. I don’t know why, but Sammy was nuts about me. It may have had something to do with him being a little younger and less experienced than I was. He took an interest in everything I was doing—the movies I was making, my friends, the girls I liked, you name it. I came to like Sammy very much. He was a gifted performer who could do just about anything on stage, or in front of a camera. When I first met Sammy, he was a sweet and rather delicate person, but then he fell in with Frank Sinatra, and running with Frank’s crowd got Sammy into some deep trouble.
Sammy was close to Jeff Chandler, a Jew from the Bronx who was also a close friend of mine. He was the guy who had done that cameo with me in the bar scene of Frank’s film a few years earlier. Jeff injured his back while he was filming an action picture in the Philippines, and he was hospitalized until he could have surgery to relieve his pain. Tragically, he died on the operating table. By that time Sammy was spending a lot of time gallivanting around with Frank, and he didn’t find a way to visit Jeff in the hospital. I was a pallbearer at Jeff’s memorial service, and I noticed that Sammy didn’t even arrive at the synagogue until after the ceremony had started.
When we all got up to leave at the end of the service, I went over to Sammy and said, “Jeff was looking for you.”
“Well, I was around,” Sammy said.
“No, you weren’t,” I said. “You were chasing Sinatra.”
Sammy said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Things between Sammy and me were never quite the same after that, which was a shame, but I wouldn’t have felt right just letting it slide.
The premiere of Six Bridges to Cross was held in Boston. When it was announced that I was coming for the premiere by train from New York, there was a mob scene at the Boston train station. So one stop before my train was to arrive in Boston I was met by a car and driven to the event. The ride took about an hour and a half, and my arrival was timed so I would arrive just in time for the festivities.
When we were ten minutes away, we pulled into a gas station, and I went into the men’s room to change into a fresh suit. I also put on a trick shirt, with sleeves that were held on by only a few thin white threads. The idea was that one of the girls at the scene would pull on my sleeve and we’d have a photographer there to take a picture of fans tearing my clothes off.
We stopped two blocks away from the theater. Lined up in the street were hundreds of teenage girls, every single one of them waiting for me. When I got out of the car, there was a roar, and as I was hustled through the crowd girls started tugging at me. To the embarrassment of two ardent fans, the trick shirt worked to perfection!
I loved the fan response I was getting. I was having fun with it. Even though I wasn’t doing the kind of movies I wanted to do, I was thrilled to see that I was becoming so popular.
• • •
• • •
In 1954 I starred in the only musical I have ever made, So This Is Paris, a film about three sailors on leave. Richard Quine directed it, and I danced in the film with Gene Nelson and Paul Gilbert, the other two sailors. Nelson, who staged all the dance numbers, helped me learn the steps. He said, “Put your hand on my shoulder. When you feel my weight shift, you shift.” He was really the first person who ever taught me how to dance.
In the movie, Gloria DeHaven played a woman who ran an orphanage that we adopted. I had never forgotten that electric moment when I had locked eyes with Gloria as a teenager in the Navy, when she had entertained the troops at the Hollywood Canteen in LA. And here I was, years later, making a movie with her—and she was my leading lady! I told her about seeing her at the Hollywood Canteen, and she thought it was very sweet.
Gloria was a beautiful, gracious woman, and I wanted her badly. When we were doing the picture, she let me know it was okay for me to come after her, so between shots we started a relationship. This was one of only two times I actually fell in love with my leading lady (although I enjoyed many a romance that didn’t involve love). I really felt deeply about Gloria. I liked everything about her, including her inherent grace, her beauty, and her ability to carry on our relationship without feeling guilt—or making me feel guilty. She never once put any pressure on me to get a divorce and marry her. It would have driven me to distraction if she had, but she was much too classy for that.
Gloria and I were fortunate enough to be able to spend almost an entire weekend together at the Beverly Hills Hotel. In those days we’d work half days on Saturdays, so this time, as soon as we finished, we both drove to the hotel, went up to our room, and spent the better part of a fabulous few days together. We continued to see each other for a while until everyday life intervened. I still run across Gloria every now and then. I love her to this day.
My next movie, The Purple Mask, was a cheap knockoff of The Scarlet Pimpernel—and my last swashbuckler. Angela Lansbury played my love interest. During the filming, Angela constantly smiled at me and made nice, but many years later she commented, “Things got so bad for me in the fifties that I had to make a movie with Tony Curtis.” When I heard this I thought to myself, Things could never get bad enough for me to make another movie with you. This gives you an idea of how my career was viewed by some Hollywood insiders. Nor could I completely disagree with them. I was filling seats in the theaters, but the films themselves weren’t classics. Not even close. They were a reflection of Universal’s emphasis on profitable, low-budget movies, pure and simple.
No one outside show business understands how complicated it really is. Everyone thinks actors are rich and famous and lead charmed lives. But to get to the top, you can never be satisfied. I had wanted to be in pictures, and now that I had achieved that goal, I wanted to be in quality pictures, and that would mean making some changes.
The Purple Mask would be one of the last few movies I made at Universal. In 1955, I did two more films for the studio: The Rawhide Years, the only western in which I ever starred, and The Square Jungle, the Universal version of John Garfield’s and James Cagney’s boxing films.
Arthur Kennedy, an excellent actor who earned five Academy Award nominations, was my costar in The Rawhide Years. I also really liked my leading lady, Colleen Miller, a beautiful girl who had a brief film career. The director was Rudolph Maté, who had been a great cameraman for Harry Cohn at Columbia. He had photo graphed Rita Hayworth in the Oscar-winner Cover Girl, so they made him head photographer-cinematographer. Then he started directing movies, and this was the second movie I made with him.
During the first movie I made with Rudy, I had noticed that he would shake his head at the end of a scene. He’d say, “Cut. Print,” but his head would be shaking, and I would be upset because I thought he didn’t like what I had done. After a while I noticed his head shook like that all the time, and it had nothing to do with the acting. It was just a tic. Once I got past the feeling that I could never please him, I discovered that Rudy was a very lovable man.
The Square Jungle was fun to do too. I was a prizefighter, and Ernest Borgnine played my manager. Makeup fixed my nose so I looked like a boxer, and I did the boxing scenes myself, which made me
feel good.
In 1955 Janet joined the cast of My Sister Eileen, along with Jack Lemmon and Betty Garrett. She had always wanted to be in a musical, and now that she was in one, she trained every day so her dancing and singing would be up to snuff. Her choreographer was Bob Fosse, who had a reputation as quite the lady’s man, even though he was married to actress Joan McCracken.
While Janet was making her movie, I went off every other weekend to spend time with Frank. Janet was okay with that, since she wasn’t around home herself. Then one weekend I came home and found a letter from Fosse to Janet. “I can’t wait to see you,” it said. “When you’re coming, please let me know.”
I couldn’t be absolutely sure, but it certainly looked like Fosse had written a love note to my wife. I was wrecked. Even though Janet and I were distant, I became obsessed with the thought of Janet and Fosse in bed together; I imagined it over and over again, getting more upset each time. The letter brought back the feelings of jealousy I’d had when I pulled up at the studio to pick Janet up and saw Howard Hughes lurking in the shadows.
To make matters worse, Janet was working with Fosse day in and day out, so I got no relief from my jealousy. I decided not to confront her about the note, fearing that Janet would tell me she wanted a divorce. But that didn’t mean I was going to be cuckolded and sit idly by. Sure, I had had affairs myself, but for one thing they always made me feel very guilty, and for another I made damn sure that Janet would never find out about them. I always hoped that if she ever got involved with anyone, I’d never know. Knowing changed everything, or at least that’s what I told myself.
I decided then that I was going to get more out of life. I was thirty years old, in my prime, and I was at a stage in my life and my career when beautiful girls with fabulous figures were constantly throwing themselves at me. In the past I had turned down a lot more advances than I’d accepted, but I decided that from that point on I would partake more fully of the bounty being offered me.
By this time Hugh Hefner had become a good friend of mine. To get away from Janet and Fosse, I flew to Chicago to visit with Hef. That weekend I met some very friendly Playboy bunnies, and I had not even the slightest pangs of guilt about having sex with them. After a week of debauchery in Chicago, I knew I was going to be all right.
If marital troubles had been my only problem, things wouldn’t have been so bad, but I was getting lots of grief from my mother as well. I had bought a group of twelve garden apartments and I had given my parents one of the units to live in, with the understanding that my mother would be responsible for renting out the other units. Even though she had a real estate agent to help her, she was a real pain in the neck about it. She was constantly calling me with complaints about tenants and conflicts that were largely of her own making. Since she was my mother, I couldn’t exactly avoid her calls.
In addition to my marriage and my mother, I had my career to worry about. I was working very hard making movies and doing publicity. My pictures were making a bundle, so the studio kept putting me in movies, but the movies I was in were B pictures, and it was time to step up to A pictures. But the way my contract was worded I didn’t have the right to refuse any of the pictures Universal handed me; when a contract player like me refused a picture, his or her salary got reduced by a fee called a suspension—and I needed the full amount. I had my parents and Robert to support, not to mention my own household. The stress I was under became unbearable, and I sank into a terrible depression.
Bob Raines, who was now running the casting department at Universal, was a nice guy, a little bit older than I, and he could see I was having trouble. He suggested that I go see a psychiatrist, and when he told me the insurance would pay for it, I went along.
I would lie on a couch in the middle of the day, and Dr. Frym would analyze me. I don’t know if it helped me, but I certainly liked the attention. He’d say, “Tell me how you’re feeling,” and I would rattle on about myself. I rather liked it. At first I’d randomly hit on something useful to explore, but soon I discovered that all I had to do was talk about my family in order to hit something worth digging into.
By the end of 1955, Universal had cranked up its publicity machine to make Tony Curtis a household name all over America. Having gotten me in all the fan magazines, the studio now tried to get me on as many TV shows as it could. TV was becoming very popular, so I would fly to New York and go on talk shows. I never talked very much on those shows. The host would say, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tony Curtis.” I’d come on, they’d applaud, and the host would say, “Hi, Tony. So, your new film is The Square Jungle. How did you like making it?”
“I liked it a lot. I got to do my own boxing scenes.”
“Who else is in it?”
I’d rattle off the names of my costars.
“And what’s it about?”
“Well, it’s about a grocery clerk whose father is a drunk and whose girlfriend doesn’t think he’s going to amount to anything. So he becomes a boxer, finds out he’s a natural, and becomes the challenger in a big title fight. Like I said, it’s a boxing movie.”
“That’s great. Tony Curtis, ladies and gentlemen.” And off I went. There was nothing subtle about television interviews in those days. You get on, you plug the movie, and you get off.
I was a guest on What’s My Line?, hosted by John Daly, and I appeared on one of TV’s biggest hits, The Ed Sullivan Show. When I appeared on his show, Ed said, “I want you to meet the new bright star at Universal: Tony Curtis.” He knew the response he was going to get, and he got it: the girls in the audience all began screaming. I didn’t want the applause and the yelling to ever stop. Now that I was making movies in Hollywood I didn’t want to be known as a mere actor. I wanted to feel like a star.
“The Cat’s in the Bag, and
the Bag’s in the River”
In rehearsal for Trapeze, 1955.
My agent, Lew Wasserman, had an uncanny instinct for making the right move at the right time. Lew’s job was to provide my career with direction; my job was to put on some makeup and a costume and act. Early on Lew told me that the way to become successful was to take whatever parts came my way and not to give the studio a hard time. That’s what I did. And it worked.
In fact, any advice he gave me always worked out the way he said it would. One time I signed to do a picture called Lady L for MGM. Orry-Kelly, the clothes designer, showed me some sketches he’d made of me in costume, and I was really excited about the part. But when the time came for me to shoot the movie, MGM wasn’t ready to proceed, and they wouldn’t pay me.
I went to Lew and told him how MGM was screwing me over. He said, “Go to MGM, ask where the stage for Lady L is, walk over there, and look for someone to tell you what to do.” I did that, and of course there was nothing to do, but I stuck around for half a day. Lew encouraged me to keep going back. I did that for seven or eight days. My contract was guaranteed, and with me showing up ready to work day in and day out, Lew was able to say that I was holding up my end of the contract. He made them pay me, even though they weren’t going to make the movie. They wound up dropping the project, although the studio revived it a year later with Paul Newman.
I did very well just by having Lew’s advice in my ear—and following it. With him guiding me, I couldn’t go wrong. It was like talking to an older brother.
Lew got along well with just about everyone in Hollywood. He loved Alfred Hitchcock, and Hitch loved Lew. I remember being at a party one evening and watching the two of them sitting in a corner talking. Lew was sitting there in his horn-rimmed glasses with his long legs crossed, while Hitch was perched on his seat—all five feet seven inches of him in that famous pear shape. To look at them, these two men couldn’t have been more different, but they were bonded by the power of their remarkable intellects.
Lew loved to hear me talk about my life. He was fascinated by stories about my childhood, because he came from such a different background. Lew came from money and was
well educated, articulate, and comfortable with power. He could handle things. He was also very kind. Whenever I reached out to Lew, he always responded. It always meant a tremendous amount to me when someone really enjoyed my company. Lew obviously did.
One day Lew called and asked me to meet him at his office. When I got there, he said, “I’m not sure whether we can swing it, but United Artists is making a movie with Burt Lancaster called Trapeze. Harold Hecht is producing it. They’re going to shoot in Paris, and they want you to play the younger guy, the ‘flyer,’ who gets flung around by the bigger guy.”
“I love it already,” I said.
“I knew you would,” Lew said. “I’m trying to arrange it with Universal.”
When Lew spoke to Ed Muhl, who was running Universal, at first Ed refused to let me go. “We’re doing great with Tony now, and I don’t think we want to loan him out anymore,” Muhl said.
Lew, who ran one of the most powerful talent agencies in Hollywood, wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He told Muhl, “Listen, you need to put Tony in that picture. Look how important he’s going to be for you when he finishes making it. You have to consider that.” But Muhl still wasn’t convinced. So Lew had Burt Lancaster talk with Ed Muhl. Burt was a very energetic and imposing fellow, and with a few suggestions from Lew, Burt found a way to get Ed to say okay.
The director of Trapeze was Carol Reed, the Englishman who’d directed The Third Man. The producers were Harold Hecht, Burt Lan caster, and Jim Hill. Harold had discovered Burt on Broadway and brought him to Hollywood, and the two became partners in an independent production company. But after six or seven years Burt and Harold no longer got along. Burt felt Harold was imposing himself too much and he wanted to replace him, but they had a contract, so Burt hired Jim Hill to serve as a buffer between himself and Harold.