The Making of Some Like It Hot

by Tony Curtis

  Jack and I had been practicing how to walk in high heels for what felt like weeks, but we were still having trouble. Billy didn’t mind. “It can’t be too good,” he said. “It has to be kind of awkward for the audience to be in on the joke, to really get a laugh out of it.” Billy later said that he added more footage of us walking to give the audience time to recover from their first laughs. If you look closely at the scene, you’ll see that’s true. MGM only supplied three coaches. No engine and no caboose. In the final cut Billy had us walking by the middle car over and over.

  This was our first day working with the film’s director of photography, Charles Lang Jr. He’d been around a long time and I’d seen quite a few of his pictures—who hadn’t? The Uninvited, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Sabrina. He was a distinguished gentleman, but he always looked like he was squinting at something a long way off. That was fine with me. He made me look great, in drag and out of it.

  We got our shots done and then—drum roll—it was time for the first one of Marilyn. This was around eleven. Surprisingly, she was there. In fact, she’d arrived early. “I want the world to know that Marilyn is not only on time, she is three hours early,” Billy told Bob Thomas of the Associated Press. She was sitting in a chair on the sidelines, wearing a black outfit with a monkey fur trim and a feathered hat. She smiled at me, not at my outfit. She was used to that from the tests. Billy told me that she’d made a fuss when she saw hers.

  “I am very disappointed,” she said to him in the projection room. “I thought the picture was going to be in Technicolor. I’m at my best in color.”

  “Well, Marilyn,” he explained, “we were fooling around with color. I tested it. It didn’t look good. You know, we have these men made up as women. If we did it in color, we’d need too much makeup not to have the beard showing. It’d be a real problem. So we have to do it in black and white.”

  Of course it helped that Lang was a master of lighting and had gotten some lovely shots of her in the tests. But Billy later admitted that he was giving her a line. Jack and I would have photographed all right in color. We didn’t look green or garish in the color tests. Billy just didn’t like color. “It’s like shooting inside a jukebox,” he said. “Everybody looks blue or red. Even the dialogue sounds phony in a color picture.”

  Sitting slightly behind Marilyn on the set was a short, heavy, middle-aged woman. She was dressed in black and holding an umbrella. This was Paula Strasberg. Everyone knew who she was: Marilyn’s “drama coach.” There was more to it than that. The influence that Lee Strasberg had over Marilyn had to be maintained. So he and Paula flew out to L.A., rented a house in Santa Monica, and Paula followed Marilyn to the set, where she proceeded to hover over her. Literally. With the umbrella. Somebody new on the set whispered to somebody else, “Who’s she?”

  “The Bat,” came a whispered reply. There was a precedent for the name-calling. Laurence Olivier had called Paula “the Beast” when she interfered with his directing The Prince and the Showgirl. There were more giggles and whispers, but Paula ignored them. Every so often, she would open her umbrella on the stage. She didn’t realize how unseemly that was, how ridiculous, following Marilyn around with an umbrella—indoors. Appearances can deceive. Paula was getting $1,500 a week from United Artists. What was that for? Interpreting the script? Moral support? Keeping the sun off Marilyn? It wasn’t long before we found out.

  The first shot of Marilyn as Sugar was a tracking shot like the one Jack and I had done. It was straightforward and simple. The shot had no dialogue. It showed her walking along the coaches, holding her ukulele case, looking for Sue and the band. Then she passes Jack and me, and the camera stays on us as she walks off. Since we’d already walked that stretch, it was lit. The lights didn’t need to be rekeyed for her. And the camera would use the same tracks to roll ahead of her.

  Billy rehearsed her. She looked nervous. Her eyes darted to the side every now and then. I wondered what she was looking at. Then I saw. Paula was standing off to the side, about twenty feet behind Billy. Marilyn could see her over Billy’s shoulder. That’s where Marilyn was looking. It soon became obvious that as Marilyn rehearsed her walk, she looked past Billy to get Paula’s approval. There wasn’t much to approve. All Marilyn had to do was walk and look ahead. When it was time for a camera rehearsal, Marilyn did the same thing. She walked the length of the platform, came past us, and then looked over at Paula, who sat there with a knowing expression on her face.

  Paula’s going to direct the movie, I thought. She’s going to take over. Marilyn will work only if Paula says so. She’s going to do only what Paula wants. How interesting is this?

  Billy was ready for a take. “Action.” He stepped back and let the crew move the camera along as Marilyn walked and dress extras passed by her. “Cut.” Marilyn had stopped before she got to her mark, the place where she was to end the shot. Billy looked at her for a second. “All right,” he said to her. “Let’s do it again.” I’d heard that Billy could be dictatorial and unfeeling on the set. I didn’t see it. He was obviously getting resistance, but he showed no emotion. He was concentrating on the spatial components of the shot. Something was bothering him. “Action.” Marilyn walked again. “Cut,” said Billy. He knew what it was. He pulled the assistant director over and spoke to him. “I don’t want that one,” he said pointing to an extra, “crossing in front of Marilyn until she gets past this point. This is her first shot in the picture. We need to see her all the way through.” He paused and looked at Lang. “Okay. Camera? Let’s go. Once more, please, Marilyn.”

  Marilyn walked the length of the platform and craned her neck slightly. She got to the mark and stopped. “Cut,” said Billy. Marilyn looked past him again, at Paula. This time he caught it. He was not going to let it go. He spun on his heel, looked Paula in the eye, and said in a very clear voice, “How was that for you, Paula?”

  Everyone froze. Absolute silence. Paula sat up, cleared her throat, and answered, “Fine, Billy.” He turned around and went on to the next angle. He’d put Paula in her place. And it stopped her cold. She quickly found an excuse to go to another part of Lot 2. It was a while before she reappeared. When she did, she sat where Marilyn could not make eye contact with her. Billy had fixed her. Can you blame him? He’d cowritten the script. He was the director, not some poseur. He’d staked his turf. After that, Marilyn decided it made more sense to play by his rules. And Paula stayed out of his way.

  Billy Wilder was not someone to trifle with. He was brilliant, and he had the ego to go with it. Unlike a lot of artists, he was also a businessman. He knew which end was up.

  I made a mistake that first week. I came on the set while he was directing pickup shots of the girls. I wanted to ask him about billing. He was busy, but I insisted. Finally there was a break, and I asked him what size my name was going to be relative to Marilyn’s and Jack’s, both in the credits and on the posters. He looked me up and down. “Young man,” he said. “you’re quite something today. Are those pants tight or are they really pants? You look like you’ve been dipped in India ink from the waist down.” I tried to be good natured about his joke, but I persisted with the business about my credit. It didn’t sit well with him. He took a breath and gave me a look. “The problem with you, Tony, is that you’re obsessed. Yes. With small pants. And big billing.”

  I tried to laugh. And then I let Lew Wasserman handle the billing.

  13

  On the second day of shooting at MGM, I did my scenes with Sweet Sue, who was played by Joan Shawlee. She’d been doing bits for years but was also known locally. She had her own club on Lankershim Boulevard. It was called Joani Presents, and it specialized in adult entertainment, talented ladies with duck’s-ass haircuts wearing tuxedos and doing monologues about how women didn’t need men. You get the picture. Joan was a truly talented woman with a wicked sense of humor. When she found out that she had to play her scenes against me and Jack in drag, she said, “As long as I don’t have any scenes with children
or animals, I’m fine.” She wasn’t, though. Marilyn called Billy Wilder. She had seen Joan. There was a problem. “My hair was the same color as Marilyn’s,” recalled Joan.

  “No other blonde,” said Marilyn to Billy. “I’m the only blonde in the picture.” He had to concede the point. She knew photographic values. “There was a love affair between her and the camera,” Billy said later. “She stood out. And she knew it.”

  Joan was wearing a hat in her first scene with Marilyn, so they didn’t have to reshoot it, but Joan immediately reported to makeup to have her hair color analyzed. “They changed it,” said Joan. “And after nine bleaches and four color experiments, almost all my hair fell out. It was seven inches long when I started. I ended up with an inch and a half. I was in danger of becoming a female Yul Brynner.” She wore a wig in most of her scenes.

  On the afternoon of the second day, Marilyn went to Goldwyn to look at the rushes of the first day’s shooting. She sat with Billy. When the lights came up, she thought for a few minutes and then spoke to her director. “Billy,” said Marilyn, “you have to come up with something more. The scene doesn’t work. I’m just walking. That’s no entrance.” Of course, what she meant was that it was no entrance for a star. Billy told her that they’d reshoot it. After she went to her dressing room, I could hear her yelling at someone. “I’m not going back to the fucking film unless he reshoots my entrance! When Marilyn comes on, nobody should be looking at Tony Curtis playing Joan Crawford! They should be looking at me! Marilyn Monroe!”

  Marilyn’s remarks made their way to Billy. That night he met with Izzy Diamond in the office. They discussed Marilyn’s entrance. Izzy brought up the much-quoted sight gag in The Seven Year Itch, where a burst of air from a sidewalk grate blows up Marilyn’s skirt.

  This meeting signaled the beginning of another phase. Though Billy was on the set every day from seven thirty in the morning to seven thirty at night, and Izzy was there, too, from this point on they were writing in the evening. There was a reason: the newness of what we were doing. It was uncharted territory. An entire picture with guys in drag. The writing had to flexible, adaptable. The project would be evolving as we filmed it, so Billy and Izzy needed evening sessions to work things out. Not to mention that the script wasn’t finished. And Marilyn needed an entrance. “I couldn’t sleep that night,” Billy said later.

  On Wednesday morning we were back at MGM. Billy had solved the problem. He had Marilyn walk beside the train again. As she passed the space between two coaches, steam shot out and goosed her. The steam was funny, even if it should have come from the engine. With comedy, you play it fast and hope no one notices things like that. But it punctuated her entrance.

  On Thursday, August 7, Marilyn didn’t go to MGM. She was at Goldwyn getting a ukulele lesson when a transcontinental call came to her dressing room. Her agent in New York wanted her to call Arthur Miller. The United States Court of Appeals had voted 9 to 0 to overturn his contempt of Congress conviction. He would not have to serve a thirty-day jail sentence or pay a $500 fine. The court had determined that the hearing in question had failed to tell Miller that he risked contempt for refusing to answer a question. More to the point, the court called a recess before which Miller said that he would be willing to answer the question—later. He was never recalled. But he was charged. I heard that this was payback by the HUAC for his writing a play called The Crucible, a thinly disguised allegory of the congressional witch hunts. Who knows? After talking to Miller for half an hour, Marilyn was so relieved that she celebrated with a solitary champagne breakfast in her dressing room.

  On Friday, Marilyn invited reporters to Goldwyn so she could talk about Miller’s acquittal. A dozen photographers squeezed into her dressing room as she said, “Neither my husband nor I had any doubt about the outcome of the case.” While she explained this, she moved from pose to pose for the photographers. “I particularly never had any doubt because I have been studying Thomas Jefferson for years and, according to Thomas Jefferson, this case had to turn out this way.” Her explanation stopped when impatient reporters asked her when Miller would be coming to see her. “He said he would probably be out before the picture ends,” she answered. “I never know when to expect him. He’s always surprising me. Maybe he’ll even be coming this week. I don’t know.” At this point Marilyn excused herself, grabbed her ukulele, and resumed practice with a coach.

  People who knew the gist of the script asked me what Janet thought of my doing a picture with this sex symbol. Janet wasn’t concerned. She was carrying our second child. Marilyn had a phalanx of fat women around her. Her husband was on his way. What could happen between us? Nothing. Okay, I’d been known to have affairs with my leading ladies. Not all of them. But a lot of them. It became a running gag. “Tony, do you have that in your contract?” Very funny. If I’d gone on location to Italy with Gina Lollobrigida, Janet wouldn’t ask what I planned to do in the evenings. She’d ask if I was getting a percentage of the net or the gross. She had a well-organized mind, that girl. If she’d been playing Sugar in Some Like It Hot, it would have been a totally different experience.

  14

  The second week of Some Like It Hot took us back to the Samuel Goldwyn studio. I got into a routine. Up at seven, into the shower, into the Rolls, down the canyon to Beverly Drive, left on Santa Monica, right on Formosa, and into the parking lot. Then I’d walk across the street to the Formosa Café and have breakfast with Jack Lemmon. The eggs were tasty, and we could talk about the picture while we ate. “You know,” he’d say, “I’ve been thinking about that scene. I have an idea.” So we’d throw it back and forth. It was quiet there compared to the studio. There’d be a couple of writers at another table. And maybe some newspapermen at the bar. We knew they were hanging around, hoping to overhear something about Marilyn, so we didn’t say anything they could use. After breakfast, we’d walk back across the street and go into makeup. By nine thirty, we were in costume and ready to shoot.

  The scenes we were shooting that week had us in drag. One thing I discovered when I had the dress on for the tests was that the material clung and showed a lot. There was a nodule between my legs, if you get my drift. So we had to hide that. The wardrobe people gave me this steel jockstrap. It worked. I looked like one of those anatomically incorrect dolls. No nodule. No bulge. Nothing. But there was a problem. I had to wear this thing under my dress all day. When I had to pee, it was a lot of work to get this thing off from under the dress. I couldn’t see myself doing this every few hours. I thought about it. What kind of mechanical thing would take care of it?

  I put my thinking cap on and built a funnel-and-hose thing. It went around my thigh, down the inner side of one leg, and was hidden inside the silk stocking that I was wearing. I’d unroll it, take care of business, and then roll it up again. I didn’t have to stand up or even sit down. It wasn’t all that comfortable, but it worked. I should have taken out a patent on it. Nobody figured out that I had it. “That Tony!” they said. “How does he do it? In drag all day, wrapped up like a mummy. He never complains. Never goes to the bathroom. What control. What a trouper.”

  One day Jack caught me in the men’s room. I was adjusting the thing.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” I answered. “I’m inventing something.”

  I didn’t tell him because he might judge me. He was kind of conservative in an odd way.

  Our first scene at Goldwyn was on Monday August 11. The set was on Stage 3. It was the ladies’ lounge. Marilyn was on time and knew her lines. Billy shot the master. He worked with me and Jack and then let us go while he shot various angles of Marilyn. No over-the-shoulder shots. So I didn’t see much of her that day. No one did. While Marilyn was finishing the lounge scene, a limousine pulled up outside the soundstage. Arthur Miller got out. He was dressed casually. No jacket, no tie. Just a dark polo shirt. In those days that was unusual. He came onto the stage but didn’t talk to anyone. He stood by the do
or and waited for Marilyn to finish. Then instead of joining the company for lunch, he whisked her away in the limo.

  Our first week of shooting took place on a train set across town, at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayerstudios. This scene shows me with Jack Lemmon, an uncredited player, and Dave Barry, who played Beinstock, the manager of the girls’ band.

  Our scenes inside the train coach were shot on a breakaway set at Goldwyn.

  Here you see Jack, me, and some of the girls in the band.

  People ask me if I had to compete with Jack Lemmon in front of the camera.

  This is an unusual photo of Billy Wilder. He’s sitting. Usually he was in motion: walking, striding, gesticulating, smoking. Never at rest.

  I was delighted to have Jack Lemmon as a costar. I loved the work he did. He could be theatrical without worrying if he was making a fool of himself.

  With Billy Wilder, as with many other directors, I found myself looking for a father figure.

  This is the scene where Marilyn had problems with bits of physical business while she was lip-syncing to the recording of “Runnin’ Wild” that she’d made earlier.

  Jack and I shot numerous scenes wearing high heels, standing for hours while Marilyn blew her lines. “Tony and I suffered the tortures of the damned in those heels,” Jack said later.