by Tony Curtis
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When movie offers stopped coming in, Irving Lazar said to me, “I don’t want you to stay out of sight for too long, so do some talk shows.”
I said, “Will they want me?”
“They’re all going to want you,” he said. “So don’t be shy about it.”
Dan Rowan and Dick Martin had invited me to appear on Laugh-In five times over the past several years. I had always wanted to do sketches and stand-up comedy, and this was my opportunity. I was delighted with the results, and I was happy that they liked me too. Then Mike Douglas called, and I went out to Philadelphia to do his talk show.
Irving Lazar continued to do what he could to get me parts, but the offers had dried up. An agent I knew, Freddie Fields, who had a lot of action in Las Vegas, asked me to go there and work as an emcee for a couple of weeks. He had hired a bunch of variety acts, and my job would be to would introduce them; as part of the gig I would also perform some magic tricks. The audience loved it. When we got to the end of the run, the hotel people begged me to stay on longer, but I had had enough.
When I saw I wasn’t being offered movie roles, I decided to become a producer. I tried to produce a film called The Night They Raided Minsky’s, which was going to be about a burlesque house and the strippers who worked there. Each stripper thought she was going to end up being a star like Gypsy Rose Lee. I was going to play the lead. I thought the movie would be very funny, but we didn’t end up with a suitable script, so I wound up not producing it. Norman Lear took the project on, and did a great job with it.
I didn’t work in a single movie between 1971 and 1974. My star had fallen so far that I couldn’t even get work on an American TV show. I did get a role on an English TV show called The Persuaders, with English star Roger Moore. Roger had played Simon Templar on the TV show The Saint for six seasons, and later he would star in a string of James Bond movies. The Persuaders was about two millionaire playboys who roamed Europe fighting bad guys. It was similar to James Bond, but perhaps a little more realistic.
Before I flew to London to start shooting The Persuaders, I carelessly threw a little marijuana in one of my bags. By this time pot had become very hip in Hollywood, and everyone and his brother was smoking it. Marijuana was cheap, and it wasn’t addictive. The worst feature of smoking pot was that you tended to eat a lot of munchies. That, and the possibility that it might accidentally find its way into your luggage. To make matters worse, for some reason I must have thought I might need protection across the pond, so I packed a .38 pistol in another bag.
When I got to England, customs inspectors went through my suitcases, and they found the marijuana and the gun. They confiscated them and allowed me to go on to my hotel, but a few hours later I received a summons to come to court the next morning at ten. When I arrived the next day, the British police kept me in a jail cell until my case was called. Everyone treated me very nicely, but I was beginning to get worried. When it was time for my case, the police officers led me up a spiral staircase, and at the top I found myself in the middle of a courtroom.
The judge, a woman, asked me to explain myself.
I said, “Well, ma’am, I don’t drink alcohol, because of what it does to me. But marijuana seems to calm me down. And I honestly don’t know why I brought the pistol. I just threw it in my bag without thinking. I had no intention of using it.”
She let me off easy, with a fifty-pound fine, but the incident made all the papers in England and America. One headline read, TONY CURTIS BROKE AND BUSTED. I felt humiliated, but there was nothing I could do about it except give myself a pep talk. I said to myself, Go ahead, world, do your worst. I’ve had it up, and I’ve had it down. Whatever happens, it won’t be as bad as my childhood.
Penny and I decided to buy a house in London on Chester Square while I was making The Persuaders. Lew Grade, who was financing the show, intervened with the bank to make it possible for us to buy the house. I later found out that Penny had tried to make a secret deal with Lew and the bank so that if she and I ever got divorced, she would get the house. I was furious, and my sense of trust was badly shaken.
Penny and I were walking down the streets of London one evening when a car pulled up beside us. A window rolled down, and there was Paul McCartney. Paul later told me he had idolized me because I had been the first movie star to wear my hair long, a real rebel. He said my look had inspired him to dress however he wanted to.
Paul yelled out the window, “We’re going to a party. Want to come along?”
“Great,” I said. We got into Paul’s car, and he took us to a place that looked like some kind of futuristic auditorium, gleaming white and antiseptic. When we got there, we sat and listened to a speaker who went on about spaceships and the future. If this was what parties were like in the future, then send me back to the past! Well, maybe not. The Beatles were the future, and I certainly liked them. We always had a good time together.
Meanwhile, Penny was also making friends in London. One night she took me to a party at the home of a famous British musician—I can’t remember his name—and she chased after this guy the whole time we were there. That really ate me up. My idyllic third marriage was starting to spring some leaks.
The interior shots for The Persuaders were shot in London, and the exteriors were shot in the south of France, so we could take advantage of the extraordinary beauty of the place. There’s a river near Nice that runs right out into the sea. The estuary at that spot is half a mile wide, and producers liked to shoot adventure stories there because it looks like the sea but is much, much calmer.
When we traveled for location shoots, Penny usually stayed behind in London. Despite my own dalliances, I was devoted to her, and I thought it would be easier for her to stay home because my shooting schedule was always so hectic—two nights in one place, one night in another, three nights in another. Also, it made more sense for Penny to stay home now that she and I were spending a lot more time with my daughters from my marriage with Christine, Alexandra and Allegra.
I had unexpectedly won a reversal of the custody decision from my divorce with Christine, because I’d discovered that the kids really needed their father in their lives. In 1971 the girls had come to France and I had had a chance to see them for the first time since the divorce. I wanted them to eat healthier foods. They had been eating so much candy that it was a wonder they weren’t toothless!
I went to attorney Marvin Mitchelson, a good friend of mine, and sought his help in gaining custody of the kids. And that is exactly what happened: I was awarded custody. Penny and the girls got along well, which made me feel great.
While we were working on The Persuaders, Roger Moore and I became the best of friends. We had a wonderful time together, shooting twenty-four fifty-minute shows in the first year. We worked with a variety of talented European film directors who couldn’t find movie work, so we had good directors and all the best European leading ladies. One of those was Joan Collins, a British actress best known for later playing Alexis Carrington on the American TV soap opera Dynasty.
Joan’s bizarre behavior made her rather difficult to work with. In one scene, we were supposed to drive a little truck a couple of hundred yards to where the camera had been set up; then I’d stop the truck and we’d both get out. When the time came to do the shot, the assistant director waved a flag, which was my signal to start driving, but Joan said, “Don’t go yet. Please. I’m not ready. Let me get into the mood.”
I leaned out and shouted, “She’s not ready.” Joan started fixing her makeup in the side-view mirror. I waited and waited. Every now and then I’d look over at her. She kept fiddling with her face. Finally I lost my temper. I said, “Joan, will you stop acting like a cunt? Let’s go get this shot, and then we can break for lunch.”
She said, “What did you say? You called me a cunt.”
I said, “I’m sorry, Joan, but can we please go?”
The assistant director waved the flag,
and I drove to my mark. When I stopped, Joan leaned out the window of the truck and screamed, “He called me a cunt!” She leaped out of the truck and said, “I’m going home!”
Going home? I thought. You’re lucky to be working. She stalked off to her trailer.
The producer, Bob Baker, said to me, “Tony, you’ve got to do something about Joan.”
“What do you want me to do?” I said. “I apologized in the truck.”
Bob sent a runner to go buy some flowers, then he brought them to me and said, “Take these to her.”
I went to Joan’s trailer and knocked, and she opened the door. I said, “Here, Joan, these are for you. I’m really sorry I said what I did. I got nervous when we were doing the shot. Please for give me.”
“Well, that’s all right,” she said. “I forgive you.”
She closed the door, and I whispered under my breath, “You cunt.”
After the episode wrapped, I called Lew Grade and said, “Any more episodes with Joan Collins, and you’d better get somebody else to do them, because I won’t work with her again.”
During the two years I spent in Europe I met some very interesting people, including the artist Balthus, who lived in Rossinière, Switzerland. Balthus was thrilled to meet me because he loved the movies and enjoyed meeting actors, and I was thrilled to meet him because I loved art and wanted to meet artists. I bought one of his paintings, which, sadly, I was later forced to sell when I was strapped for cash.
After we finished shooting the first season of The Persuaders, it was summertime, so Penny and I decided to take a family vacation on the island of Sardinia, in the middle of the Mediterranean. By this time she had given birth to Nicholas, so we invited Alexandra, Allegra, Kelly, and Jamie to join us. It was a rare opportunity for me to have all my children together in one place. I loved Sardinia; the water was gorgeous. The only off note was Penny’s mood; she seemed distant and unhappy. By the end of the summer, I felt we might all do better going back to the States.
The Persuaders was a huge hit, a very successful TV show in England, France, and Germany. On the nights The Persuaders aired in England, the streets literally emptied because everyone wanted to be home or in a local pub so they could watch the latest episode. It was the biggest television show in England.
The show’s success couldn’t alleviate the stress I felt. I now had five kids—with one more on the way! Penny and I were soon to be blessed with the arrival of a second son, Benjamin. But how was I going to support my growing family when I couldn’t get a movie role? Looking back, I see that I was always so busy concentrating on my work that I never took the time required to be a good family man. I guess I wasn’t wired to be a good father. Whenever I fell deeply in love with a girl, I knew that the only way to keep her loving me was to marry her; but once she gave in and married me, children became involved, and somehow I was never prepared for that. I guess I had a hard time sharing the affections of the woman I loved.
To make a buck and stay in show business, I agreed in October of 1973 to star in a play called Turtlenecks, which was renamed One Night Stand. Written by Bruce Jay Friedman and produced by David Merrick, it was bad by either title. The play opened in Detroit, and I had a lousy time of it. The director was incompetent, and the other male lead, William Devane, was a miserable guy to work with. The director sat next to Bruce Jay Friedman on opening night, and they laughed uproariously at the dialogue, but I knew better. The show closed in Philadelphia without ever making it to New York.
After that I made a couple of TV movies, including The Third Girl from the Left and The Count of Monte Cristo. I would have liked to star in a TV series of some kind, but I made good dough from those TV movies, which took maybe ten to fifteen days to film. I was also able to tell myself I was still making movies, even if they were for television. Lots of people saw them, which meant they knew I was alive and working, and that helped make it okay.
In 1974 I finally got a film. I was hired by two Israeli producers, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, to star in Lepke. The film was about Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the Jewish American gangster who was the only mob boss ever to be executed for his crimes. In March of that year, while we were still filming Lepke, I got a call from Memorial Hospital in Culver City, California. My mother was in the hospital, suffering from heart failure.
I flew to California, but before I even made it into her hospital room, I could hear her voice from the hallway. She was yelling, “Tony! Tony!” I stood outside her room, filled with rage as I remembered all the things she’d done to me during my childhood, all the cruelty I’d never confronted her with.
A nurse walked out of my mother’s room into the hallway and saw me standing there with my hands in my pockets. She said, “Are you Tony?” I nodded. She said, “Well, what are you waiting for? Go on in and see her. She’s been calling for you.”
I shook my head and said, “You don’t understand.” That was all I could manage.
The nurse said, “You’re her son.”
I said, “You don’t know what she put me through.”
I tried to force myself to walk into that hospital room, I really did. But I’m ashamed to say I just couldn’t do it. I walked out, and never went back.
My mother died about a week later. I didn’t know how to feel about that. All my life I had resented the way she had treated me, but now that she was dead, I wondered if maybe I had been too hard on her. My guilt lasted until I opened her safe-deposit box and read her will. She had ten thousand dollars in cash, and her will stipulated that the entire sum go to my brother Robert, in the mental hospital. I had told her earlier that if she left anything to him, the state would just take it, but she left him that money anyway. She did it deliberately. She knew how to stick it to me, even in death.
After my mother died, I hoped that her death might finally free me of the bitterness I felt toward her. Our relationship had been so ugly for so long. I had felt no warmth or kindness from her since I was a very small child, when she used to sing to me in Hungarian. I remember her beautiful voice and how it made me feel when she sang to me. But those memories would give way to my recollection of years and years of terrible loneliness as I came to understand that I was never going to find in this woman the love that I needed so badly. The beauty of those early moments faded quickly, but the anger and bitterness lingered for a lifetime.
I enjoyed making Lepke, and the movie did well, but I could see that my career was in serious trouble. For one thing, I wasn’t properly connected to the film industry anymore. Nobody wanted to take a chance on me, whereas in my salad days if you put me in a movie, it was money in the bank. I really didn’t know whom to talk to about this. Lew Wasserman was no longer by my side, and Irving Lazar was no help. I could have talked to someone at William Morris about it, but I wasn’t sure William Morris would have done better for me anyway.
My stomach was in knots all the time. There I was, growing into middle age, and nobody cared. I would read in Variety about upcoming pictures that seemed like they might have parts for me, and a couple of times I even swallowed my pride and called producers to ask them, “You got a role for me?” But that never works. Being your own agent is like being your own lawyer: you have a fool for a client.
Fortunately I had a little money from several real estate ventures. On the advice of my attorney, I had bought two hundred and fifty acres of land in Perris Valley, California, that I leased out to vegetable farmers. I had tied up a big chunk of that land with a thousand dollars of prepaid interest. As I started paying off the principal, the land became more and more valuable. After a while I was able to sell ten acres for a hundred thousand dollars. Then, as the California land boom hit, I sold another piece, and another, until I was making more money from real estate than I was from the movies.
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After Lepke in 1974, I didn’t make another movie for almost two years. Then Elia Kazan asked me to play Rodriguez in the movie The Last Tyc
oon. Robert De Niro played studio boss Monroe Stahr in a cast filled with wonderful actors. When Elia called me, it brought tears to my eyes, because at that point I really thought my career was over. The character I played was a guy who couldn’t have sex with his wife anymore. He had been a great actor, and all the fans loved him and wanted to see him, but when he got home with his wife, he just couldn’t get it up.
In the film I take my problem to De Niro’s character and say, “What am I going to do?” The purpose of the scene was to show how the head of a studio has to know everything about everybody. The part of my wife was played by Jeanne Moreau, the famously sensual French actress known for movies like The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim. I was overjoyed to find myself with an outstanding part in a very powerful film. Elia, who was a fantastic director, even let me direct one of my scenes, which made me as happy as I could be.
Some people in Hollywood were angry at Elia because he had named names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the Red Scare of the early 1950s, but no one in the cast cared. That wasn’t any of our business, and it had happened a long time ago. For me, I understood only too well how tough it could be to get hired when the tide had turned against you; the pressure was unbelievable.
One thing I remember about The Last Tycoon was how great I looked in it and how much some of the older actors like Ray Mil land and Robert Mitchum hated me because of that. My character had a great wardrobe, and I had dark hair with sexy sideburns, and it just killed those two to see me like that. Ray Mil land in particular was a total prick. He’d be talking with another actor, and I’d walk over to them, and he’d mutter, “Forget it,” and walk away. His coldness was very unpleasant, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I shrugged it off.
Ray Milland was best known for playing a falling-down drunk in the famous Lost Weekend. He was part of the WASP old guard, and I always felt he might be an anti-Semite. One time I overheard him and his group discussing the usurpers who were trying to get into Hollywood. He wasn’t talking about me, but he mentioned a producer’s wife who was Jewish. I knew he was one of the people who subscribed to the theory that I had married Janet Leigh as a career move. Milland was poison, so I just stayed away from him as much as possible.