Naughty Tony

Hollywood legend and eternal bad boy Tony Curtis dishes on his gay fans, his torrid love life and Marilyn’s private parts

CHAMPAGNE PUSSY IMPERSONATED:
“Marilyn” and Curtis

by MATTHEW HAYS

Tony Curtis seems such a sweet man in person. He’s in town to accept his lifetime achievement award from the World Film Festival, and also eager to hock his memoir, American Prince.

At one point, Curtis takes my hand firmly, and tells me how great it is to meet up with people like me and talk about his life. And it is a life—as evidenced by the book. Some of Curtis’s legendary, storied past isn’t quite so sweet. There were the landmark film roles, of course—among them his turns in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958) and Some Like It Hot (1959)—but Curtis’s off-screen shenanigans have been every bit as titillating.

Sitting and listening to Curtis, now 83, look back on his life is not comparable to a sit-down with your average grandpa. When I bring up Marilyn Monroe, his co-star in Some Like It Hot and also his lover, he’s quite blunt about, well, how she tasted. “That dame’s pussy tasted like champagne!” he says. His eyes light up as he recalls their tender romance, and he begins to sound a bit like Grandpa Simpson on a Viagra/speed cocktail. “I had a lot of fun with Marilyn. A friend of mine had a house on the beach. I would take her there, and we would make love on the beach. We would get hamburgers and a steak to cook, and then we’d build a fire. Marilyn knew I might screw up the steak, so we could rely on the hamburgers. We were very in love with each other. She started to learn about men with me, and I was learning about women with her.”

Then Tony—he insists I call him that—segues into his oral-sex routine. “I think one of the beautiful moments a man can have is when he’s going down on a woman. It’s entirely pleasurable. The corridor, that lasts forever. You know the only thing bad about it? The view! When you’re down there, what can you see?”

Writing the book (with co-author Peter Golenbock) was a great task, Curtis says, in particular as he was able to set the record straight about various bits of Curtis lore. He has been quoted far and wide as saying that kissing Monroe was “like kissing Hitler.” This led to far-reaching speculation that, if he didn’t like kissing one of the most powerful female sex symbols of the 20th century, then Curtis must just be a wee bit queer. But Curtis says that while the quote is accurate, he was saying it as a joke to some of the crew of Some Like It Hot. And while he’s no queer himself, Curtis says he loves his gay fans, and has had many close friendships with gays in Hollywood.

Miraculous survival

Curtis concedes it’s a bit of a miracle that he’s still chugging along as an octogenarian. He’s less mobile than he was—he conducts this interview from a wheelchair—but he continues to paint and act occasionally. His book is a litany of brutal Hollywood clichés, multiple marriages ending badly (including to ex-wife Janet Leigh), stints in rehab, a son’s life taken by drug abuse, and a chapter titled simply “Cocaine.”

Then there are things that are just plain strange. Elvis Presley went on the record to credit his famous, rolling coif hairdo to Curtis’s influence. “Elvis and I knew each other, but not very well. And that’s what we handed to each other, to give it to the next generation. It was like the Olympic relay races. It’s important that members of the younger generation continue to have hair like that.”

And while Curtis weathered hard times as an actor—many of the roles dried up for him after the ’60s—he still speaks keenly about the Method and about what makes for a great performance. “With Sweet Smell of Success, I was able to bring a lot of my own emotions to the role. I think you’ve got to do it without overloading yourself. And it is about spontaneity, about being in the moment. I don’t think you can relive an emotion. It should be called on because you’re able to use it one time.”

With that, Tony says goodbye, as his sixth wife, Jill Ann VandenBerg, ushers him off to another interview. He shakes my hand firmly as we say goodbye. “What a pleasure it was to talk to you,” he says, with a sweetness that seems utterly genuine.

AMERICAN PRINCE: A MEMOIR BY
TONY CURTIS, HARMONY BOOKS, HC,
384 PP $25.95