by Tony Curtis
That was it. Not a lot of dialogue. It wasn’t like “You’re so sweet. Why don’t we get together? What’s your room number?” That’s the way I thought it would sound. No. It was just “Come and see me tonight.”
I didn’t see her at dinner. I had the impression that she might have left. But there was no way I could find out without being obvious. I didn’t know her room number. And in those days when you were on location, where you were staying remained a secret. So I had to figure it out. And I did, or so I thought. The Hotel del Coronado was a hard place to find a room. The numbers were peculiar. There were some that were freshly painted or something. It was about ten o’clock when I went to look for her room. I went up to the floor where I figured she was staying. I looked up and down the hallway. I felt like I was in one of those silent pictures. I walked quietly up to the door. I think it was H43. I knocked on it. It opened. But Marilyn wasn’t standing there. It was an actress who was playing one of the girls in the band. I said, “Hi.” What else could I say?
“Hi, Tony,” said the girl. “You want to come in?”
“Uh, no. I just wanted to know if you heard what time our call is tomorrow morning.”
“Eight. You don’t want to come in?”
“Uh, yeah, but let me come back. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I knew I was in trouble. I knew that girl would tell everybody in the morning, and the next thing I’d be walking down the aisle with her in a wedding ceremony. But I forgot about that and kept looking for Marilyn’s room. Finally, by process of elimination, I found it.
Jack got to go into the water in his scenes at Coronado. I didn’t.
I posed for this series of photos while Billy was doing shots of Jack and Marilyn.
Billy called me the best-looking kid in town. I was thirty-three.
I never thought of acting in movies as the ultimate way of earning a living. But it became that—and more. I found that people were getting something from me that they didn’t get elsewhere.
While I was on location in Coronado, my wife, Janet, brought our daughter, Kelly, to visit me. Janet was pregnant with Jamie Lee, so she didn’t want to pose for pictures.
Kelly was two when these pictures were taken.
These pictures make the Hotel del Coronado look idyllic. In reality, it was a hotbed of gossip. And I wasn’t far from the center of it.
Marilyn opened the door a crack. I squeezed through it. I sat down with her, made small talk, and had a drink. She wanted to talk about the movie. She was concerned about how Billy and Izzy were developing her character. I was surprised she would want to discuss this. Then I found out why she wanted to. Paula wasn’t there that night. Arthur Miller was traveling. Marilyn thought she could talk to me about this. She said she wanted more scenes between me and her, more of a relationship. She was concerned about it. She was peculiar. There was no reason for her to worry about that. Billy had it all worked out in the script. I assured her that he was doing what was best for her. She seemed to accept it. Then I moved closer to her and we started to relax.
Of course I’d been with her all those years before. Now, on this night, in this hotel room, there was a feeling of two people who liked each other. And they decided that they wanted to spend the night together. It wasn’t complicated. I didn’t have to think about it in a complicated way. She made it simple. She could easily have pushed me away with something like, “Listen, don’t come near me. You know how things are with me.” She was capable of doing that. I’d heard. But she didn’t do that. Quite the opposite.
When I was in bed with Marilyn, I was never sure, before, during, or after, where her mind was. She was an actress. She could play a part. She could give the part what she thought a man wanted. I never got that from her, but I never questioned her, either. I never asked for more. What I experienced with her was unforgettable.
We spent the night together. Or, rather, part of the night. I had to be up at four thirty and back in my room before anybody saw me coming out of hers. But we lay in bed for a while. We were affectionate with each other. I stroked her hair, and my hands moved all over her. Touching her, any part of her, never felt obscene or vulgar. I couldn’t be vulgar with her. I didn’t know what effect it might have on her. But how do you define vulgar? I didn’t know. That was my problem with Marilyn. I genuinely didn’t know what she wanted or didn’t want. That was probably because she didn’t know herself. That was her problem in the movie. She floated through it, needing someone to tell her who she was and what she was. She was both child-like and childish.
Marilyn was a child all her life. That was her way of dealing with people. It was a behavior that she used to keep them in line. I got a little of it, but not enough to hurt me. That was what she did, you see. That was what she was like. A little girl—with this incredible body. And I mean incredible. A body that had everything a man would want. She had hips like a Polish washerwoman. Not to the point that she was ungainly, but there was such a contrast between her hips and her back. She had that narrow back. And full breasts. And a long, graceful neck. She had an incredible, unique body. And she knew it. She used her sexuality.
I never could understand why she married a guy like Arthur Miller. She was intellectually unprepared for someone like that. All I could think was that maybe it was a game for her. Milton Greene was a good friend of mine, and of course he spent a lot of time with her, photographing her and even producing her pictures. She rattled him. I encountered him after he had gone to New York to see her. He was having a hard time. He wanted to be with her. He was ready to give up everything—his family, his photography business, everything—for her.
She had a lot of guys scratching at her, trying to use her. She was the most important star in movies, but she didn’t really understand that. She had so much power. She could have used it in so many ways, become so great. She was hated by a lot of people, certainly by the press. There wasn’t one article about our film that was wholeheartedly sympathetic to her. What they resented was her power. So much of Some Like It Hot rested on her. If only she’d used her power to bolster her self-confidence. But she didn’t. Even as she was turning in this miraculous performance, she was losing her sense of self. And things started to go wrong.
19
On Thursday I had more scenes with Marilyn on the beach. There was no awkwardness. In fact, she didn’t act as if anything had happened between us. Which was fine. I found out that Janet was coming to the set and bringing Kelly with her. The photographer Eve Arnold was there that day, too, shooting portraits of Marilyn on the beach. Janet showed up in the afternoon with Kelly. I’d finished my shots, so I got out of my costume and visited with them. I thought it would be rude to just go off with my wife and kid before they had a chance to meet everybody. But I sensed that Marilyn was getting nervous. Did she think that Janet would suspect? I don’t know. But it didn’t feel good, so I hung out at the edge of the set for a while, posing for Floyd McCarty, who was the unit stills photographer. Then I took Janet and Kelly into the hotel.
I didn’t see Marilyn that evening. I drove back to L.A. with Janet. I later learned that Marilyn was not doing well. She stayed in her hotel room. She had May Reis type a letter to a friend named Norman Rosten. Marilyn knew him because he’d been Arthur Miller’s close friend for years. She may have been drinking when she dictated the letter. She was evidently upset.
“Don’t give up the ship while we’re sinking,” she wrote. “I have a feeling this boat is never going to dock. We’re going through the Straits of Dire. It’s rough and it’s choppy, but why should I worry? I have no phallic symbol to lose. Marilyn.” Scrawled below was a postscript. “I would have written this by hand but it’s trembling.”
What did she mean by that remark about “phallic symbol”? Was she referring to me and Jack playing women? Did she think that was why I went to her room the night before?
I wasn’t there on Friday the twelfth, but I heard about it. Marilyn was two hours late to the set.
The sun was too high to shoot by that point, so they had to wait until after lunch. Then they had to get her down from her room again. She took her time. When she finally got back to the set, the sun was so low that they had to shoot close-ups. Jack was feeding her lines.
“It took me about two weeks to figure her out, to get used to her,” Jack said later. “At first she just threw me. We’d be doing a scene, with the camera running, and she would just stop. Just like that. Whether there was one page left or one line. She’d just stop and look off and say ‘Sorry.’ And Billy would have to say ‘Cut.’ He didn’t like it. No one did. But we eventually saw that she had a built-in barometer of how the thing was playing. If it didn’t feel right, she couldn’t make herself continue.” We’d seen some of the rushes at Goldwyn the week before. “Something happens when she’s in front of the camera,” Jack said. “It’s something between her and the lens. It’s not something you can see. When I’m right next to her, looking her in the eyeballs, I can’t see it. But I sit in the projection room and watch her in the rushes and there it is. A magnetism. A magic.”
It was true. Marilyn had no peer at creating magic. She also had no concept of courtesy, responsibility, generosity, or of anything that you’d expect from a professional. She just had this scene going in her head and she had to get it out. Billy had been through this with her, and he thought he knew what to expect. But this was worse. I could see he was tense. He carried that tension in his back. Some people carry it in their chests or their necks or wherever. Billy stood a certain way so that it stressed him there. But I remember him saying to Doane Harrison one day, “With this girl, I’m doing many more takes than I would ordinarily. But when she finally gets the scene, yes, it’s worth it.”
Arthur Miller was in Roxbury, Connecticut. He and Marilyn had bought an old farm house there (his second) and were in the process of remodeling it. Marilyn was calling him every couple of days. On Friday night they talked about the feature Life magazine was doing with the Avedon photos of her posing as some of the old stars. Marilyn also talked about the first draft of Miller’s text. She’d read it and was unhappy with what he’d written. She was so unhappy that after they ended the call, he immediately wrote a letter to her, trying to justify his ideas. He told her he was seeing a psychiatrist. He asked her to understand his mental confusion.
Marilyn tried to sleep. She couldn’t. She took some sleeping pills. Maybe she couldn’t see clearly. Maybe she was already groggy. She’d been drinking. She took too many pills. There was a reaction. She started vomiting. She called Paula and May. She continued vomiting. They got a doctor to her. He called a specialist. On Saturday they drove her to Hollywood and had her check into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. The press didn’t find out that she was there until Sunday. The official line was that she was undergoing tests for an illness she’d gotten in San Diego. Miller flew to Los Angeles to be with her. The production had to wait.
20
The shooting schedule for the week of September 15 had to be scrapped. There were no scenes that could be shot around Marilyn at the Hotel del Coronado. The entire company returned to L.A. and waited while Billy determined which sets at Goldwyn could be readied for shooting with other cast members.
He held meetings with Arthur Krim, Walter Mirisch, and Izzy Diamond. The possibility of replacing Marilyn was discussed. The first third of the filming was completed, but Krim asked Billy what he thought of shutting down and recasting Marilyn’s part. They considered using the contingency fund. This is the percentage of a film’s budget that’s like the reserve tank in a car. If you get into trouble, it’ll hold you over until the insurance kicks in.
I saw Billy that week and asked him what was going to happen. He said he needed to think about other options. We talked about some actresses who could play the part if Marilyn couldn’t. Natalie Wood. Carroll Baker. Mitzi Gaynor. Any of them could do the part and make it work, but Marilyn had something special. Special? No. Unique. Yet Billy told me he was willing to fire her. “This is not the story of Sugar Kane,” he said. “This is the story of two musicians who have to dress up like women, and one of them happens to fall in love with a beautiful girl singer.”
Billy worked like crazy to line up scenes for the week. The production office was phoning everybody. They were surprised. Usually when you get a call like that, it’s to tell you that you won’t be shooting now. You’ll have to wait. You never get a call to come in for a scene that’s scheduled later in the production. By Tuesday, when Billy started rehearsing the cast at Goldwyn, Marilyn was still in the hospital. He called Lew Wasserman and asked him to speak to Marilyn and Arthur Miller. I went back to work and hoped for the best. And I hoped that Marilyn hadn’t become upset and taken too many pills because of what she and I had done at the hotel a few nights before.
The Pullman set was still standing, so Billy filmed another scene of Jack and me there. In this scene, Jack sneaks from upper berth number seven to upper berth number two. This is after he’s pulled the emergency brake handle and broken up the party in his berth. He climbs into number two thinking that I’m Sugar and starts to confess. I let him go far enough to hang himself and then I start to shake him “like a terrier shaking a rat.” He says, “You wouldn’t hit a girl, would you?” Fade out.
Next Billy was going to shoot the scenes of Daphne’s date with Osgood. You know George Raft was a great dancer in his early pictures. I loved him in Bolero. The dance instructor on Some Like It Hot turned out to be kind of a dud, so George stepped in and taught Jack and Joe E. Brown to do the tango for free. George suggested to Billy that Some Like It Hot end with a tango between him and Marilyn. That’s actors for you. I can’t blame him, though. He could tango. And it would have been sensational, but not for the story that Billy and Izzy had written.
It was about this time that Billy got more bad news. Edward G. Robinson sent word that he was not going to do the picture. He didn’t say why, but everyone knew. He was not going to work with George Raft, no matter how much he’d mellowed in seventeen years. Billy was livid. The only reason he’d hired Eddie Jr. was to curry favor. Now he had someone he didn’t really want and he still had to cast a showy part.
I was honored to be working with Pat O’Brien (right) and George Raft (left). These men were kings in their own right.
This is a photo of the cake that turned into a practical joke on the set.
Here’s a gag shot of me and Jack surrounded by the actors who played George Raft’s henchmen: Mike Mazurki, Harry Wilson, Pat Comiskey, Jack McClure, and a couple of crew members whose names I can’t recall.
This is a shot of Jack Lemmon and Joe E. Brown rehearsing the tango just before shooting the scene of their big date. Watching them are George Raft and the co-writerof Some Like It Hot, I. A. L. Diamond. “Izzy” Diamond was often on the set to assist Billy Wilder with last-minute rewrites, but they seldom took place there. Billy didn’t like changing lines of dialogue on the set. The rewriting took place in evening and weekend sessions.
George Raft coached Joe E. Brown and Jack in the art of the tango. Although he’s known for his tough-guy roles, George was a celebrated dancer for a time.
Here’s a shot of Billy Wilder directing the nightclub scene. He used a bullhorn because there were two hundred people on the set.
Billy took his turn making the gag shot with the “gangsters,” which was funny; he was as tough as any gangster.
Walter Mirisch was disappointed and so was I. I’d really looked forward to working with Edward G. Robinson. I’d met him on the set of the Frank Sinatra picture A Hole in the Head. He spoke impeccable Yiddish. Like Billy, he had an extraordinary art collection. Sad to say, Eddie G. lost half of it to his wife when they divorced. That hurt, but he wanted to get free of her. He was a sensitive and thoughtful man, but those kinds of men attract unstable people.
Eddie G. was wonderful to sit and chat with. What a story-teller. He told me about his early life in New York and how he got into movies. A fascinating m
an, and very generous. He was impressed that I’d come up from the streets of New York. He’d squeeze my face and say, “Shaineh ponem!” (“Beautiful face!”)
Marilyn was out the entire week. It turned out that she’d spoken to Walter Mirisch. “She was having serious personal problems,” Mirisch recalled. “She asked for permission to go to New York. She was seeing a doctor in New York. So we tried to schedule around her.”
We shot without Marilyn for most of the next week, too. Jack and I did a lot of scenes in hallways, and after Billy had recast the part of Little Bonaparte, we shot the gangsters’ banquet scene. When I was taking classes at the New School I knew some wonderfully talented people. Bea Arthur. Walter Matthau. Nehemiah Persoff. So when I found out that Billy had cast Nicky Persoff as Bonaparte, I was happy. I think Billy was happy, too. Nicky did a great job with this one-scene role. He even shaved his head for it. But Billy was sweating the Marilyn problem. He was under a lot of stress. I felt bad for him and wondered what I could do to make him feel better. I had an idea.
The banquet scene was the gathering of the Chicago gangsters. Jack and I hide under the table while Nicky has a huge birthday cake rolled in for George Raft. After two stanzas of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” Edward G. Robinson Jr. pops out of the cake and shoots George and his cronies with a machine gun. While the scene was being set up, I paid a woman to surreptitiously climb into the cake—a topless stripper with big breasts. Billy returned to the set, suspecting nothing. He called “Action!” The cake popped open. The stripper jumped out and shook her breasts. Everybody laughed—except Billy. He just stood there, slack-jawed. Somebody had topped him. “This the first time I’ve seen him speechless in fifteen years,” whispered a crew member. A photographer from Playboy magazine was on the set. He tried to get Billy to pose with the stripper, but Billy shook his head and said no. I’d hoped to cheer him up, and I think he appreciated the thought, but he was too preoccupied to enjoy it.
