by Tony Curtis
Of the three leads, Burt was an established star, Gina Lollobrigida was a certifiable Italian dish, and I was the up-and-coming kid. (Gina had come to Hollywood only a couple of years earlier and had starred in a movie called Beat the Devil. Trapeze was to be her second American-made picture.) So Burt got top billing, and I got second billing everywhere but in Italy, where Gina Lollobrigida wanted it. I didn’t mind; I was happy just being in the picture. The only time I got upset was when Gina wanted me to cut my hair. She talked to Burt and Harold about it, so they came to me and asked me if I would mind going to the barber. I grudgingly went along. Gina was some dish, but after that I lost my appetite for her. Every time I saw her on the set I couldn’t help but think about how much I missed my hair. If it sounds petty, I can’t argue with that. I’m just reporting events as I experienced them.
I had expected Janet to join me in Paris, but she had signed to do a picture called Safari, which was going to be filmed in Africa. What’s more, she had to go to England right away to do wardrobe and other pre-filming preparation. It had been too long since Janet and I had spent any good time together, and I found myself missing her, so I flew to London for three days before Janet left for Africa. My arrival in London made all the news papers, which always made me feel good. And Rex Harrison and Marlene Dietrich hosted a dinner party for me. Rex, later the star of My Fair Lady and Dr. Dolittle, had a crazier married life than I did. Marlene, the star of The Blue Angel, had a heartbreakingly beautiful singing voice. When she sang “Falling in Love Again,” men wept.
After dinner Janet and I went to a party with a lot of English celebrities, and Marlene was there too, leaning on a mantel with a drink in her hand. We started talking, Janet wandered off somewhere, and Marlene said, “How do you like London?”
I said, “I like it fine, but I’m going back to Paris in a couple of days.”
She said, “I’m in Paris a lot, and I stay at the George Cinq. Why don’t you call me when you’re there?” I didn’t know what to say. Janet was just in the other room, and Marlene was about fifty-five. I must have paused a little too long, because she said, “Don’t be concerned.”
I said, “Why would I be concerned?”
She said, “I’ll treat you well.”
Marlene Dietrich was a huge star, and I loved the way she talked and sang, but she was too old for me. I didn’t have many firm rules, but not dating my mother (much less marrying her) was inviolable. Okay, Freud might argue that every man dates his mother in some form, but this was getting much too close.
I pleaded with Janet not to go and do the film in Africa. With Bob Fosse’s note still lingering in my mind, I was afraid that we were drifting so far apart that our marriage was becoming irreparable. It was far from a perfect union, but for some reason I didn’t want to let it go.
“Why are you doing this picture in Africa?” I asked her. The reason was simple: she wanted to work. It was a modest opportunity, but she liked acting. I was hoping she’d take this chance to choose me over her own work, but she refused. Here I was in this important movie, which gave her an opportunity to join me in a beautiful, romantic city, but she was running off to Africa. But there was no moving her. I understood Janet’s choice only too well, but it was still painful when we went our separate ways and got to work.
During the evenings in Paris I was very lonely. Sometimes I’d go out to dinner with the movie crew, and the emptiness I felt was unbearable. There were also evenings when I sought out the company of beautiful French girls. They didn’t mean anything to me, but for the short time we were together they managed to keep my mind off my loneliness.
Burt Lancaster and I stayed at the George Cinq, and Burt had the suite directly above mine. I would step onto my balcony, climb a lattice up to his balcony, and knock on his window. Burt would open his window and let me in. We’d talk and get loaded, and I’d stagger downstairs to my room. One night, after I returned to my room from dinner, Burt leaned over his balcony and called down to me: “Come on up here, Tony.”
I climbed up, and there he was with two French girls. When my head came over the balcony railing, one of the girls screamed—not because she was scared, but because it was me!
Despite these diversions, I really missed Janet during my stay in Paris. She was in Africa, and there were only certain times during the day when I could call her because she had to travel from wherever they were shooting to where there was a phone. Janet’s costar in Safari was Victor Mature. Janet later told me about a scene when she was in the Congo River, and she had to swim across to the other side. The script read: A crocodile swims by.
When they were discussing the scene, Mature said, “Where will I be?”
The director said, “You’ll be in the water.”
Mature said, “No, I won’t.”
The director said, “You don’t have to worry. The crocodiles will swim around you.”
Mature said, “No, they won’t.”
The director said, “I’m telling you, don’t worry. I’ll have a propman out there with a gun, and when you step into the water, he’ll fire it, and the crocodiles will scurry away.”
Mature said, “What if they’re hard of hearing?”
Before we began filming Trapeze, I spent two months in Paris training with a fine company of acrobats attached to the Cirque d’Hiver. I had learned how to tumble before, but their routines were a lot more elaborate than anything I’d ever done. I also got some training from Burt, who had worked as a circus acrobat when he was a young boy, and from Fay Alexander, my stunt double. I was the flyer, and Burt was the catcher. I learned to swing on the trapeze and time my release so that my momentum would carry me to the point where Burt was on his trapeze, his arms extended to catch me. I also learned to throw my feet out when I swung to help my momentum carry my body across the space it had to travel.
The professional acrobats also showed me how to land on the net, thirty feet below. It was called a safety net, but you could still get hurt on it if you weren’t careful. I’d hang from the trapeze, and Burt would yell, “Now!” Then I’d let go of the trapeze and lie flat, fall straight down onto the net and bounce. Fay taught me not to change the direction of my body as I was falling, not to look over my shoulder, not to do anything—just let go and wait.
There was only one serious injury during the making of Trapeze. We had some circus lions on the set, and everybody was nervous about them—with good reason, as it turned out. The girl who stunt-doubled for Gina Lollobrigida was in the pit with the lions when they started fighting with each other. She stood stock-still and waited for them to calm down. She wasn’t attacked, but a little later on, when one of the custodians went into their den to feed them, one of the cats attacked him, bit him, and dragged him around. He didn’t die. He was ripped up pretty badly, but he recovered. By the end of Trapeze I was a skilled flyer.
Alone in a strange land, I did what I could to keep myself busy when I wasn’t making the movie. I’d always had a deep love of art, so while I was in Paris I looked up all the places where Modigliani had lived. Modigliani was loaded with talent, but he drank a lot, did lots of drugs, and came to a sad end. I went to his studio and stood at the spot where his mistress had jumped out of a four-story window the day after he died. I wasn’t depressed enough to follow her example, but I was lonely enough to relate to how she’d felt.
Dean Martin happened to be in town while I was there, so I went to see him, and we palled around a little. He was in town to make The Young Lions with Marlon Brando and Monty Cliff. Dean was staying in the hotel right next to the George Cinq. Another day I spent some time with Billy Wilder and his wife, Audrey. They were in Paris making Love in the Afternoon with Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn.
I hated being separated from Janet at this difficult time in our marriage, but she hadn’t been willing to give up her work to spend time with me, and I wasn’t willing to make that sacrifice for her, either. I knew that doing this movie was definitely the right thing for my care
er. When I appeared on screen wearing white tights, my body hard and fit from having trained so much on the trapeze, my professional stock took a big jump up. After Trapeze, I could do no wrong. The big joke in town was that young ladies weren’t the only ones I was attracting; gay men were supposedly lining up to see me in the picture. I remember a newspaperman who said to me, “I just came back from a prison up north, and you’re their favorite actor. The inmates have got you all over their cell walls.”
I got about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for making that picture, which was a ton of money in those days. I made more from that one picture than I would make in a year at Universal. So you can see why Universal didn’t want to let me make the film. They didn’t want me to get a taste of the money and the stardom that lay outside the walls of Universal. But now the genie was out of the lamp.
United Artists was thrilled with the way Trapeze turned out. The high quality of the movie only made me want to leave Universal more desperately. As grateful as I was to Universal for giving me my start, after I made Trapeze I just couldn’t stand the thought of going back to my low-budget contract roles. Once again, Lew Wasserman came through for me. He said to Ed Muhl, the president of Universal, “If you let Tony do outside pictures, that’s only going to enhance his value to Universal. Why don’t we make it a brand-new seven-year deal, starting now, but you’ll let him make every other picture for an outside studio?” Universal agreed. Both sides benefited, and Lew once again demonstrated that he was the smartest man in the business.
After Trapeze I did a movie for Universal called Mr. Cory, directed by Blake Edwards. We went to Lake Tahoe for the location shoot. Charles Bickford, a big, burly actor who played in a lot of westerns, was cast as my sidekick. In the movie, I play a busboy in a summer resort who becomes a successful high-stakes poker player. I make so much money playing poker that I open my own casino. Then I get in trouble with one of the other owners, who shoots me, but I survive and end up in the arms of one of the movie’s two leading ladies.
Kathryn Grant, a sweet girl who always wore her hair in bangs, was in the picture. She was twenty-two years old, and I was attracted to her, but I didn’t pursue her, because she was engaged to Bing Crosby. Martha Hyer was also in the film, and she was also very desirable, but Al Hart, the president of City National Bank in LA, was looking after her. She liked me, but she was scared that Al might show up and catch us fooling around, which would mean bye-bye to her house in Palm Springs.
After the success of Trapeze, Harold Hecht spoke to Lew and told him that he wanted to make another picture with me. I told Lew that that worked for me. Harold said, “We have a screenplay called Sweet Smell of Success. You’ll play a tough guy. It’ll be good for your career because—”
“I love it,” I said. Harold didn’t have to say another word. I was never going to pass up a chance at a serious role.
The film was about a sleazy gossip columnist named J.J. Hun secker, who was based on real-life gossip columnist Walter Winchell. In our initial conversation the movie’s producers—Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster—said they were going to get Orson Welles to play Hunsecker, and I would play Sidney Falco, a hustler willing to do Hunsecker’s dirty work for a chance to get ahead. In the end the studio decided they didn’t want Orson because his movies weren’t doing much box office, so Burt ended up playing Hunsecker. After we began shooting I realized that Burt was a great choice for the role. He had a quiet strength that was perfect for conveying the brutal qualities of the character he played.
The director was Alexander Mackendrick, who had made Tight Little Island, an excellent European film. Burt and Harold were thrilled to get him, but what they didn’t know was that Sandy, as everyone called him, was a perfectionist of the first order. A typical ten-day shooting schedule would take us a month or more. And once Sandy began directing the movie, he brooked no interference from anyone. He was going to film it exactly the way he wanted to, and he wasn’t going to take any guff from anyone, including Harold and Burt.
The set was a replica of Manhattan’s 21 Club. In one scene, Burt is having lunch at the club when I come into the club looking for him. Burt’s line is, “Don’t sit down, Sidney. You failed me.”
I say, “Wait, give me a chance. Let me tell you what happened.” Then I slide into the booth next to him, and we begin to talk. There’s wonderful dialogue in the scene, but we had a problem with the blocking. Burt was sitting and eating on the outside of the booth’s bench seat. So Sandy says, “Why don’t we have Burt slide over and let Tony sit on the outside? That would make the shot more intimate.”
But Burt didn’t want to slide over. He wanted me to walk over to the other side of the table and sit down because he felt that his character wouldn’t let anyone box him in like that. The character Hunsecker would have always made sure that he sat so he could get away quickly; he was a newspaperman who had made a lot of enemies.
Burt and Sandy started arguing about it. Sandy raised his voice to Burt, and then Burt went apeshit. He got up and pushed the table over, sending all the plates and glasses and food crashing to the floor. Then he raised his fist to hit Sandy. Sandy put his hands up to defend himself, but he didn’t back down. He was a strong man, and he wasn’t going to take any nonsense from anyone, even Burt. Burt took a deep breath, everyone calmed down, and we did it Sandy’s way.
The truth was that Sandy had been driving Burt and Harold crazy right from the start of filming. Sandy wanted every detail to be just so, and too often Burt and Harold didn’t think Sandy’s perfectionism was necessary. If we were drinking cocktails, Sandy wanted the drinks to be a certain color. If we were having dinner in the movie, he wanted what we were eating to be the kind of food that the characters would choose. He insisted that all these things were necessary, but no one else saw the need, which only made Sandy surly and ill-tempered. He wanted his pictures the way he wanted them. Everyone agreed that details were important, but he was slowing the production down so much that it was costing Harold and Burt a lot of money.
Sandy was also big on delving deeply into the script and the characters. It wasn’t enough to have a ruthless newspaper columnist pitted against a desperate press agent who would do anything to advance himself. Sandy wanted the tension between the two men to build in a way that satisfied his sense that it was happening naturally. Clifford Odets, the acclaimed playwright, had written the script, and Sandy was having Clifford rewrite it as we were filming. When we shot the film on location in Manhattan, Clifford would be sitting in the back of the unheated props van, typing pages in the freezing cold at two or three in the morning.
One night I went into the prop truck to see what Clifford was up to, and he said, “Come here, kid. I want to show you something.” I looked over his shoulder as he typed, “The cat’s in the bag, and the bag’s in the river.” In the scene he was working on, my character plants a bag of marijuana on Hunsecker’s sister’s boyfriend. Hunsecker then asks me whether I have done my dirty deed, and Clifford’s rewrite of my answer was the “cat’s in the bag” line.
A lot of the movie’s characters had lines like that. Kello, the cop, had a line where he said, “Come here, Sidney. I want to chastise you.” Police captains don’t talk like that. “Get the hell over here, Sidney” would have been a lot more realistic. But I couldn’t change Clifford’s lines, and they were always undeniably poetic.
We all knew that Sweet Smell of Success would be a unique, interesting movie. What we didn’t know was that it would get lots of review coverage, and that Walter Winchell and other gossip columnists would be furious about it. The film was good, but Sandy took so long to make the picture that Burt and Harold never forgave him. Sandy didn’t work in Hollywood again for another six years.
As for me, people were surprised to see me playing such a serious part. The movie wasn’t for teens, my core audience, and when the word got out that I was playing a despicable press agent, a bad guy, I got bum-rapped by Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. So I was ve
ry disappointed, not with the picture—I knew what a good film it was and what a good performance I had given in it—but with the reaction to it. The media just refused to acknowledge me as a serious actor.
After Sweet Smell of Success, I went back to Universal and did The Midnight Story, a contrived, completely forgettable movie about a cop who becomes obsessed with solving the murder of a priest. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Around this time I was still spending a lot of time with Frank Sinatra. Frank didn’t serve in the military during World War II, and his critics accused him of being a draft dodger, so he was constantly veering from being defensive to being pugnacious. On the one hand, he avoided getting into fights, especially about his patriotism, or lack of it, but on a lot of occasions—especially when he was drinking—he provoked them. Someone would stare at Frank, who after all was a huge star, and his response would be What are you looking at me like that for? The next thing you knew, Frank’s friend and bodyguard Jilly Rizzo, who was a strong little motherfucker, would be busting heads.
At the time, Frank was King Kong in Hollywood, and I admired him for that. A lot of people hated him because so many people kissed his ass. Frank didn’t give a shit. He had plenty of power, plenty of money, and plenty of muscle. He always had a couple of tough-looking guys around who looked after him, traveling wherever he went.
One night Frank and I were having dinner at a restaurant in Palm Springs, and some guy looked at Frank and yelled out something nasty. Frank got up out of his chair and started toward the guy. I could see from the guy’s face that he wasn’t afraid of Frank at all, but then Frank’s two musclemen got up and took matters in hand, literally. One of them grabbed the guy by the throat, and the other pulled back his sports jacket and let the guy see he was packing a piece in a shoulder holster. They didn’t even have to hit the guy. He got the message instantly. Those guys weren’t fooling around.