Source: The Times
I'm so happy I can't see straight
It’s been a life of legendary highs — starring roles, women, money — and drug-addled lows. Aged 81, Tony Curtis remembers it all for Andrew Billen
More than 150 films. A thousand lovers. Five wives. A cruel mother. A son killed by heroin. A daughter he fears does not love him. If you have lived the life Tony Curtis has, and lived it to the age of 81, you need survival strategies. For Curtis, one is making art: the studio of his two-bedroom home overlooking Las Vegas, where he lives in self-imposed exile from his Hollywood detractors, bursts with his own: surrealist boxes filled with mementoes of his life and splashy, childlike paintings, one of which has just been accepted by MoMA in New York. A second strategy is psychotherapy: since the 1950s, when he would visit a shrink four times a week, he has been a fan of that. And a third? Perhaps it is to sit on a tall director’s chair in the middle of your sitting room and, in your unvarnished Bronx, speak with mad candour to a stranger about the love that you have been deprived of. This is what he does with me, as the dry Californian sun blares down outside and his cats patrol the room, shedding their fur. “You see, my dear friend,” he bellows from his vantage point above me, his knees looking me in the eye from beneath a pair of white shorts, “it is only in my candidness and my honesty that I can face those realities.”
His self-honesty fails him sometimes. If a toupee is subterfuge, his grey-white quiff, a rethink of the Tony Curtis haircut that was once the most copied in the world, fibs. And he deludes himself too about The Persuaders!, the adventure series he made for Lew Grade in 1971, in which he played the Yankee playboy Danny Wilde to Roger Moore’s Lord Brett Sinclair and which is about to live again on DVD. “Thirty-five years ago and it’s still hot and heavy. Isn’ t that neat? It’s very appealing to young people. Timeless. Nothing in it to provoke you into thinking, ‘Look at how old fashioned it is’. ”
Actually, it’s as dated as Danny’s feral sideburns and Brett’s poncey neckerchiefs, which is not to deny that it is still tremendous fun. When it was transmitted, he says, the whole of London would stop as people piled into bars to watch it. “Unfortunately, the networks here in America #$%& it up. They put it on Saturday night at 10 o’clock. The only ones up at that time are male nurses, giving enemas, you know?” There was no second series. That was fine for Moore, who became 007, but for Curtis, The Persuaders! was the precipice from which his career toppled. Busted at Heathrow for marijuana possession when he entered the country, within four years he was an LA recluse smoking crack.
“I could have killed myself. I think I was aiming in that direction. In one of my foggy moments I thought maybe I’d just keep going. I was very, very unhappy: unhappy with my career, unhappy with the marriage I was in. I’d never leave my apartment. I would set up my little laboratory and I would make whatever I was going to smoke. I’d invite girls to come up. It was scary: the depths of despair and unhappiness.”
He had turned 50 years old. “I looked around me and saw other actors younger than I, and a little bit older, doing well, and I wasn’t doing well. I can understand it now. I wasn’t reliable enough to use. The word got out that I was using, but everybody was using in those days, don’t you see?” His attempted self-destruction lasted 18 months. “It would have killed an ordinary man,” he boasts. “I like to say that expression. But I saved myself. Because I wanted to see my sons grow up.”
Yet even after Hugh Hefner invited him to recuperate in the Playboy Mansion, even after three spells in the Betty Ford, the demon that drove him to drugs continued to nag him. “I felt I’d been neglected by my profession. That’s what’s been driving me all my life. I had hoped that my profession and the industry would have been kinder.
“You see, I got into the movies because of my looks. Nobody can jerk me off and tell me I didn’t. I was the handsomest of boys. I was 22 years old. You couldn’t get better looking than me. What a gift I was given! So I didn’t get in the movies because I was a great actor. That I learnt. I learnt on the job.”
By 1968, he had made four movies that could have won him Oscars: Sweet Smell of Success, in which he was the sleazy, panda-eyed PR man Sidney Falco; The Defiant Ones, for which he was jointly nominated with Sidney Poitier (“How you gonna cut the statue in half?”); Some Like It Hot, where he cross-dressed and made love to his former girlfriend Marilyn Monroe; and The Boston Strangler. He became, I say, a great actor. “Thank you. So nice of you to say that to me. That means a lot to me. The way they treated me at the beginning! People at the Actors Studio used to snicker, say negative things about me. I should have been a girl with t*ts. I would do better. Andrew, that just fired me so much on the inside. I had it tough when I was a kid growing up in New York City, very difficult. I lost my brother in a truck accident — I was 12, he was 9, plus the anti-Semitism I ran across. And perhaps maybe because the way I looked when I was a kid, fresh-faced . . .”
Made him vulnerable? “I’ve always been vulnerable. Andrew, I had no education. I never finished high school . . .”
LADIES’ MAN
He gets his portrait taken. When he returns from his studio, his assistant is going through his mail. It contains one of those kid’s letters that can only have been dictated by an adult. “You are a role model for American youth,” runs its gist. “What advice can you give me?” Curtis, a less sensitive soul when performing to an audience of more than one, replies: “Date girls with big t*ts.”
He resumes his throne. T*ts aside, what was he really looking for from the thousand women he claims to have slept with? "Some knowledge of myself. It’s very uplifting for a man when you can see in a woman’s eyes that she understands you, that she’s not cruel, that she’s being sweet, that she doesn’t overpower you with anything except her beauty.
“I can usually remember them, how cruel and unnecessarily mean they were with me. I just thought of a girl that was very demeaning to me on a number of occasions, here in Vegas, a beautiful girl. I’d love to go with her. We had a wonderful sex life but when we weren’t doing sex, she was always degrading, demeaning about my acting, about my background, my speech. We would stay at the Sands Hotel, hang out with Frank Sinatra. One night she said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you. I’m pregnant and the only one I’ve been with is you.’ I said, ‘Well boy did you get $%^&**(, because I’ve had a vasectomy’. ”
He slaps his thighs at this distant deception. “From that moment on, her attitude changed. She was friendly and nice. Her name was Nancy, a Polish name. She was a showgirl in town.” He likes showgirls? “I love them. All my wives looked like showgirls.”
MOMMIE DEAREST
Bernard Schwartz, the boy who became Tony Curtis, was born into the poverty of the Bronx in 1925, the son of Emanuel, a Hungarian tailor, and his wife Helen. Helen Schwartz stands at the head of a long line of women who let him down. I ask if he can forgive her.
“Perhaps I understand more what my mother’s dilemma was. As a kid she slapped the hell out of me. I didn’t know that as a little girl she was shoved out at six years old with her sister to clean houses. Six years old! I didn’t know what she had been through, and my mother, who was not very stable to begin with, became more and more schizophrenic. When she met my father in New York she had just come to America. She was 19 or 20 years old, a beautiful, good looking woman, but nuts. She was already living in that schizophrenic world.”
Bobby Schwartz, who died in an asylum in 1993, was also schizophrenic. “My brother, yes. So it was, I guess, a family trait.”
MARILYN
I notice his house is scattered with paintings of Marilyn Monroe. “I loved her. I was 22. She was 19 when we first met. And she loved me. We were about five months together. I was under contract to Universal and she wasn’t under contract to anybody and I met her at the studio. Her hair was kind of red. It wasn’t blonde. She was a little heavier. Very voluptuous looking. So we started going out together. We had a wonderful time together. Thinking back on it, we were just kids. We were learning about #$%^&. We were learning about what you do and how not to do it.
“Then we’d see each other at cocktail parties, all through the next four, five, six years. Keep in touch. But over those five years, to get started in the business, Marilyn wasn’t very smart. She was easily induced into relationships. She’d meet a guy who says, ‘I’ll get you in the movies’ and the next thing you know she’s $%^&* him.”
He discovered her affair with Joseph Schenck, the middle-aged chairman of 20th Century Fox, and was astounded to learn that she had shared a bed with him in the guest room of the very house he was renting off Sunset Boulevard. When they came to make Some Like It Hot in 1959, he thinks she was embarrassed that he knew so much about her. At first she would not talk to him. But there were love scenes to do.
“She would rub up against me and give me an e$%^&n. She did that deliberately. I didn’t mind, but she’d rub against me while I was lying down and then before they’d yell ‘Cut!’ and before she’d get off me she’d say, ‘Tony, did you like that one?’ Then one day we were in the projection room watching (the rushes). One guy says, ‘Hey, what was it like kissing her?’ I said, ‘Like kissing Hitler. What do you think? What are you asking me for?’ ” And that’s the remark that made it into the quote books? “For the wrong reason, all the wrong reason.”
FAMILY MAN
From out of the navy and drama lessons, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1948 and within four years had wed Janet Leigh, later Hitchcock’s murderee in Psycho. Their 11-year marriage produced two daughters, Kelly and Jamie Lee Curtis. His next, to the Austrian actress Christine Kaufmann, endured between 1963 and 1967. There would be three more.
I ask if his wives furnished him with the love his mother had not. “Some did. I’ve had five wives to try out. They were all beautiful. That was one of the requisites. And when I was married I was devoted. I don’t want to be unkind about women but that was an important one. I’m a stickler for certain details, like you can't have extramarital relations.”
He was never unfaithful, I ask incredulously. “Never, until — there’s always an until — I realised that the woman didn’t care for me.”
By the time he relocated to London for The Persuaders! he was married to the model Leslie Allen, his wife for a dozen years until their divorce in 1982. I show him a TV Times article of that era portraying a happy family: him and Leslie, their sons, Nicholas and Benjamin, and his daughters by Kaufmann, Alexandra and Alleyn.
“Oh my God! There you are. Oh my God! Oh dear! How sweet that looks! I’ve got a letter somewhere that I wrote to the boys. I never showed it them but I’ve got it somewhere. I said how much I loved them. Not that that’s a big deal, you can love anything but, you know, I let them down. I did. I became very selfish. To do what I did you had to be very selfish, very selfish, think of yourself only. And cowardly. Why am I still alive? Why didn’t I bump myself off during that terrible, terrible period of time? And I didn’t. The boys were always on my mind. Eighteen years later I lost Nicholas.”
He died in 1994 from a heroin overdose. The director Billy Wilder mercilessly told Curtis that Nicholas had “learnt” the habit from him. “But I’m not an addict. I’m an abuser but not addicted. That’s where my luck is, otherwise I’d have been gone way before these guys were born . . .”
JAMIE DEAREST
I take issue with him about being a neglectful father. At his 80th birthday party, Jamie Lee Curtis spoke movingly about her father. According to Hello!, he cried.
He looks at me. He is not sure she was speaking from her heart. “I’ve never said this before. I feel that she doesn’t really care for me. Perhaps she and her sister, during those early teen years, missed me around the house, but by that time I couldn’t be with Janet Leigh any more, you know? She was disappearing into her own madnesses and that’s the truth.”
He asks to see the TV Times picture. “Intriguing. Jamie’s not in the picture, is she? Intriguing. It says a lot about her already not being there. Isn’t that interesting?” Will they ever be close now? “I don’t think so. I think there’s some jealousy between us, perhaps. At the beginning I have a feeling she wanted — I’ve never said this to anybody — she wanted to teach me a lesson for abandoning her mother and her. For her it became a battle more than a career. I have a feeling that she wanted to put me in my place.”
She wanted to be a bigger star than him? “Yes, perhaps that was it. Jamie’s having a tough time now. She can’t play the ingénue any more, and that must be tough for her. A man can segue, but not a woman. It’s a very tough profession for a woman. So all of these things spark and come into it, you know. And there’s a secret in Jamie that I can’t disclose.”
He does, of course, off the record, necessitating an emergency breakfast the next day between me and his lawyer. The secret is really no one’s business.
WIFE NUMBER FIVE
At his 80th, Hello! pictured him holding hands with someone who looked like the Marilyn impersonator who had burst out of a cake to serenade him. The blonde was actually Jill Vandenberg, the woman he married eight years ago, after the failure of a brief fourth marriage in the mid- 1990s. She is 6ft tall, 46 years his junior and, stricken with stomach flu, is today nowhere to be seen. Her passion is the Shiloh Horse Rescue and Sanctuary, a charity that saves old stallions from knackers’ yards. Hollywood can insert its own jokes.
“I know what they thought. Jilly’s a beautiful woman with big bosoms and beautiful legs and she’s 35 now and I’m 81. They said, ‘That’s going to last less than the week it took to take out the licence.’ I love her very much. I care for her and she cares for me. She’s very candid and very straight with me. So we’re having the most wonderful time together.”
How is his sex drive these days? “It was very powerful when I was a young man. It’s somewhat abated now, settled down a little bit. I became concerned after a while when I found I was not — what’s the word? — as stimulated as I used to be. I wondered if it was because I had experienced so much, or whether it was the natural grace of growing older.”
There is always Viagra? “Yes, there is and I have used some. Yeah, you can use it, but now I don’t bother. I just wait until the opportunity arises.”
He sounds happier now sex is no longer the force it was in his life. “I’m much happier now. I was so #$%^&* vulnerable. I had an e$%^&n everywhere I went. It was pointing the direction I’d go. I’m not being facetious now or trying to be funny with you, I’m telling you the truth.”
I am sure he is. By the late 1960s his reputation as a satyr was so engorged that husbands and agents vetoed him from working opposite certain leading actresses. Perhaps that was why, by 1971, he was zooming down the Kings Road not Sunset Boulevard, working for ITV not MGM. Perhaps that was why the Academy never awarded him that Oscar.
“I used to get very p*ssed off with it all, but I don’t any more. Do you know why, my dear friend? Because I’m sitting here with you in this extraordinary home with this fabulous view. I’m known all over the world. I’m a wealthy man. I drive wonderful cars. I’m friendly and open with everybody I meet. I’m so happy I can’t see straight . . .”
And he leads me out to his patio with its vista not of Tinseltown but the desert and suggests I join him in the paddling pool. In its shallows, the reporter in his suit and the tennis-shorted icon, his haircut now eclipsed by a Stetson, embrace. Tony Curtis’s strategy in life is to lunge for whatever love he can.
The Persuaders! is released as a special edition DVD box set on Sept 18
Apart from some bad language, in all of his interviews he talks of big chested women like it's an obsession of his and the most important part of a woman. 
