by Tony Curtis
Meanwhile, another pronouncement made its way into the press. “The question is whether Marilyn is a person at all,” said Billy. “Perhaps she is one of the greatest DuPont products ever invented. She has breasts like granite. She defies gravity. She has a brain full of holes, like Swiss cheese. She hasn’t the vaguest conception of the time of day. She arrives late and tells you she couldn’t find the studio when she’s been working there for years.” As we knew, she’d only been working there a month when she said that, but he made his point. Miller was determined to have the last word. He sent another telegram. It read:That others would have attacked Marilyn is hardly a justification for you to have done so yourself. The simple truth is that, whatever the circumstances, she did her job and did it superbly, while your published remarks create the contrary impression without any mitigation. That is what is unfair. She is not the first actress who must follow her own path to a performance. Given her evident excellence it was your job as director not to reject her approach because it was unfamiliar to you but in the light of the results you could see every day on the screen, you should have realized that her way to working was valid for her, completely serious and not a self indulgence. . . . She was not there to demonstrate how obedient she could be but how excellent in performance. That you lost sight of this is your failure and the basic reason for my protest at the injustice not only toward her as my wife but as the kind of artist one does not come on every day in the week. After all, she has created something extraordinary, and it is simply improper for you of all people to mock it.
But Billy was not one to submit to moral indignation. He fired back.
In order to hasten the burial of the hatchet, I hereby acknowledge that good wife Marilyn is a unique personality and I am the Beast of Belsen. But in the immortal words of Joe E. Brown, “Nobody is perfect.”
34
In March 1959 Some Like It Hot was “on the launching pad,” as we used to say in those early days of the Space Race. There was a lot of anticipation and a lot at stake: not just $2.8 million, but the careers of a lot of major players. So when Billy Wilder submitted his final cut to the Production Code Administration, he did so with a bit of apprehension.
The PCA was run by an enlightened chap named Geoffrey Shurlock. His job (paid by the industry) was to censor our movies so that no one else would want to. In the old days there’d been eight censor boards. They used to cut the hell out of movies they thought would offend people. Now there were only four remaining boards. The PCA put a stop to the butchery of film prints, but it also hamstrung artists who wanted to use adult terms to tell adult stories. Billy was supposed to submit his scripts to the PCA before shooting. He stopped doing that when the PCA rejected his script of The Bad Seed and then okayed Mervyn LeRoy’s. There was some history between Billy and Geoff, so it came as a surprise when Geoff approved the finished print of Some Like It Hot and congratulated Billy on its excellence. Not everyone agreed.
The PCA had been instituted in 1934 after a grassroots campaign against “immoral movies” by the National Catholic Legion of Decency. The Legion told Roman Catholics what films they could or could not see using a ratings system to classify them: A was morally unobjectionable; B was objectionable in part; C was condemned. In 1957 the Legion expanded its A rating to include A-I, morally unobjectionable for general patronage; A-II, morally unobjectionable for adults and adolescents; and A-III, morally unobjectionable for adults. On March 5 Geoff received a letter from the Very Reverend Monsignor Thomas F. Little, S. T. L., who was the executive secretary of the Legion:Some Like It Hot, though it purports to be a comedy, contains screen material elements that are judged to be seriously offensive to Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency, including gross suggestiveness in costuming, dialogue, and situations. Since the initiation of the triple-A method of classifying films in December 1957, this film has given the Legion the greatest cause for concern in its evaluation of Code Seal pictures. The subject matter of transvestism naturally leads to complications; in this film there seemed to us clear inference of homosexuality and lesbianism. The dialogue was not only double entendre but also outright smut. The offense in costuming was obvious.
Geoff defended the film. “So far,” he responded, “there is simply no adverse reaction at all; nothing but praise for it as a hilariously funny movie. I am not suggesting, of course, that there are not dangers connected with a story of this type. But girls dressed as men, and occasionally men dressed as women for proper plot purposes, has been standard theatrical fare as far back as As You Like It and Twelfth Night.” He could not defend the “exaggerated costumes” worn by Marilyn, but he felt that the film was essentially good-natured and consequently harmless.
Monsignor Little felt otherwise. He gave Some Like It Hot a B rating, saying that it was “morally objectionable in part for all.” The Catholic population was clustered in cities that had the big movie palaces, but many Catholics thought the Legion’s classification was silly. This made the news and influenced two of the remaining censor boards. The Kansas Censor Board demanded that United Artists cut one hundred feet of our love scene in the yacht. UA refused, having won a similar battle four years earlier over Otto Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue. Kansas would not back down. Our film would not play there, it seemed. Then the Tennessee censors got into the act and refused to let minors see the film. This generated welcome publicity for UA, the Mirisches, and Billy.
Publicity was also being generated by Marilyn Monroe. On March 18 she appeared at a press luncheon at the Ambassador East in Chicago, a setting that was in keeping with the film’s gang-land theme. A fretful photographer spilled a drink on her, but she kept her composure. She affected guys that way. Something Freudian about it.
The world premiere of Some Like It Hot was planned for March 29 at the Loew’s State Theatre. The New York movie palace located at 1540 Broadway was reopening after a year of “modernization.” This was funny. A 1920s comedy should have premiered in a house that looked like 1921. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be there, but I received letters from fans, and I have one that captures all the excitement of that night.
George Zeno was fourteen when his father took him to Loew’s State on March 29, 1959. He later wrote:The premiere happened on a very, very cold night. My father and I waited about two hours for Marilyn to show up. By this time there were more than a thousand people milling around. They were all around the theatre and across Seventh Avenue. There was a major traffic jam. The whole Times Square area was clogged. Part of that was due to the number of celebrities arriving. We saw Celeste Holm, George Raft, Harry Belafonte, and Gloria Swanson.
The minute Marilyn arrived, the crowd went mad. There was total confusion. People were pushing, shoving, screaming. Barricades were knocked down. I saw my father get pushed. He fell. I hesitated for a split second, wondering what to do. Help my father? Or get close to the woman I’d idolized for six years? My father wasn’t hurt. As he was getting up and brushing himself off, Marilyn got out of her limousine.
We’d been pushed close to it, so I got a look I’ll never forget. Marilyn was that “vision in white” you hear about, but real. White fur. Silver white gown. Platinum white hair. Porcelain white skin. All I could do was stare. She seemed more like an apparition than a flesh-and-blood person, but that apparition was burned into my memory. She waved and smiled at everyone. Then they rushed her into the theater before anything could happen to her. Like me, everyone was a little stunned.
And that movie! The laughter was so loud that my ears were still ringing the next morning. After the event, I knew that this movie was going to be Marilyn’s biggest hit, the greatest comedy ever. For a cold night, this was the kind of hot that people wanted.
A. H. Weiler’s review appeared in the New York Times the next day. To read it, you would have thought that watching us was like taking medicine. “Let’s face it,” wrote Mr. Weiler. “Two hours is too long to harp on one joke. But Billy Wilder . . . proves that he is as professional a
s anyone in Hollywood. Abetted by such equally proficient operatives as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis, he surprisingly has developed a completely unbelievable plot into a broad farce in which authentically comic action vies with snappy and sophisticated dialogue.” Yes, but did you like it? “Some Like It Hot does cool off considerably now and again, but Mr. Wilder and his carefree clowns keep it crackling and funny most of the time.”
The Hollywood premiere took place on April 8 at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The Los Angeles Times review was, if possible, even less kind. Philip Scheuer, you’ll recall, was a visitor to our set more than once. It was with disbelief that we read the title of his review. “Some Like It Hot Not as Hot as Expected.” What?
“Some Like It Hot is often funny,” wrote Scheuer, “but is not the unalloyed delight it was cracked up to be. Considering that Billy Wilder is a veteran comedy constructionist, I was rather surprised to discover that it is not at all sure what kind of comedy it is. No doubt can exist, however, that it is primarily a sex farce.” Scheuer found the gangster bits “questionably macabre,” the yacht scene “baldly suggestive,” Marilyn “provocative” but not looking or playing her best. He found Joe E. Brown’s curtain line “a startler from one who for years has eschewed anything blue.” The astute Mr. Scheuer saved his only coherent English for me. “Curtis is good enough . . . but his Cary Grant accent (not his doing) annoyed the hell out of me.”
Some actors never read reviews. I do. Mr. Scheuer’s review annoyed the hell out of me. To make myself feel better, I bought the rights to the autobiography of the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, a wild, sexy artist not unlike myself.
Part VIII
The Public
35
At the end of the first week of our movie’s release, Walter Mirisch was worried. The grosses were not so good. Apparently the potential audience members had read the reviews and were adopting the proverbial wait-and-see stance. We held our breath. At the end of the second week, grosses were twice the first week’s. And at the end of the third week, they were even higher. Izzy Diamond later described this as “one of those rare phenomena in the picture business—it just kept building.” Some Like It Hot stayed at Grauman’s for nine weeks, which was almost unheard of. Equally amazing was its return to a first-run theater on Broadway within weeks of its record-breaking first run. Interestingly enough, in a year dominated by talk of epics and dramas—Ben-Hur, Compulsion, and The Long, Hot Summer—the hits included comedies. The highest-grossing comedy ($12.3 million) was The Shaggy Dog. The next ($9.3 million) was Auntie Mame. Then came Some Like It Hot, with domestic rentals of $7.5 million and foreign rentals of $5.25 million. Its unusual release pattern quickly moved it ahead of the other films, and reissues kept it there. Add television, repertory, video, laser disc, cable, and DVD, and you have a film that may have earned as much as $30 million in fifty years’ time.
We were honored to be nominated in so many categories of Academy Awards. There were six: Jack Lemmon for Best Actor; Billy Wilder for Best Director; Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond for Best Adapted Screenplay; Charles Lang for Best Cinematography; Ted Haworth and Edward G. Boyle for Best Art Direction; and George Orry-Kelly for Best Costume Design. Of these, the only winner was Orry-Kelly. We might have had a chance if it wasn’t for Ben-Hur. The only other recognition came from the Writers Guild, which gave Billy and Izzy the award for the Best Written American Comedy of 1959.
The only other recognition? What am I saying? Some Like It Hot may be the most profitable comedy in the history of motion pictures. Certainly the most beloved. With affection like that, who needs recognition?
To give you an idea of the love this picture has engendered, I can tell you about the Moscow International Film Festival in 1963. I’d gotten invited, so I called United Artists, and the next morning I was carrying two cans of film with me onto a plane. When I got to Moscow, I was taken to a huge auditorium—like a gymnasium—with folding chairs. That was the “theater.” At one end of this big room was a platform made of wood suspended between two ladders, and on that were two ancient projectors. The festival people asked me where I wanted to stand and introduce the film.
“I’ll go up there on one of those ladders so the people can see me.” So I climbed up this rickety ladder, all the way up, with nothing underneath me, and hung on and talked to this crowd of maybe two thousand people. There was a translator, of course. They were all looking up at me. I told them what the picture was about. And I talked about Marilyn and me. And, oh, they went wild. They loved me. But that was nothing compared to what they did when the movie came on.
The same man was translating the dialogue into Russian through a microphone. And that crowd caught every nuance of the movie. When he translated the very last line of dialogue—“Nobody’s perfect”—the place fell apart. They screamed. They carried on. It was absolute madness. They loved it. And I loved it. Let me tell you, I loved it.
Epilogue
Fifty years have passed since Some Like It Hot was created. I say created because it was—it is—a work of art. I’m eighty-four now. I live in Las Vegas. I create art. I paint. I spend time with my wife, Jill. We save racehorses that are in danger of being exterminated. We rescue them and give them a sanctuary. It gives us a feeling of contributing something. You might ask if I feel that my movies contributed to our culture. I do. As I said before, people talk to me about this film or that film, people who are too young to have seen the film when it came out, and I marvel at the power of film. If I had gone from Golden Boy to Broadway, the performances I would have given—where would they be now?
I feel fortunate to have worked in motion pictures. Something I created fifty years ago is bringing pleasure to someone I can’t see and may never meet. It’s hard not to feel good about something so transcendent. Although, I’ll tell you, when I recall those Hollywood parties, none of us was thinking about posterity. We never thought that anyone would want to look at our current film a month after it came out, much less fifty years later. All we cared about was success. A better role. A better contract. A better percentage. Success.
What does success mean in Hollywood? Power—the power to choose. Some Like It Hot gave me the power to choose the costar of my next film. I had idolized Cary Grant since I was a teenager. Thanks to the film I’d just done, I got to make a film with Cary.
Billy told me that he ran Some Like It Hot for Cary so he could see my impression of him. When it was over, Cary said, “I don’t talk like that.” Come on, Cary. Of course you did.
But Cary loved me for that. It was my way of bringing him and Billy together. They’d always wanted to work together, but it had never happened. When one was free, the other was busy, and so forth. They were frustrated about it. So when I played Cary in Some Like It Hot, it was like Billy finally got to direct Cary. And then I got Cary to work with me in Operation Petticoat. And that was satisfying—being on a submarine with my idol, almost twenty years after I’d seen him in Destination Tokyo and joined the navy in emulation.
After Some Like It Hot became a steamrolling hit, I was a major player. But I didn’t realize it. I had made it really big and didn’t know it. Well, I kind of saw it. And I gradually realized it, but I didn’t understand how I got there. I looked at the film and I thought that in the beginning of it I was weaker than I really was. Everything was done to keep Marilyn happy. She was chosen, favored over Jack and me. That’s what colored my perception of the film for a long time. Too long. But I finally got past that.
I thought a lot about Marilyn in the years after we made Some Like It Hot. I felt like things were unresolved between us. I saw her trying to pull herself together, to make a go of her marriage, and to be acknowledged for her talent. I also saw her becoming spoiled, slovenly, deluded, and addicted. It got to be a very sad spectacle. I remember the last time I saw her. It was at Peter Lawford’s. I was hanging out with Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack at that time. So there was the occasional trip to Lawford’s beach house
. Marilyn was there one day. She looked tired and unhappy. But her eyes lit up when she saw me across the room. I went over to her.
“Where’s your green convertible?” she asked me.
“You mean the one with the Dynaflow Drive?”
“I guess so,” she smiled, a little vaguely. “Yeah. Uh huh. That one.”
“In Buick heaven.”
“That’s nice.”
I squeezed her hand and excused myself. And that was the last I saw of her.
Sad? Yeah. The slump she went into in the summer of sixty-two was even sadder. I’d heard about her problems with Twentieth. I had my own problems at that point. I was being divorced by Janet and getting ready to leave the country. I wasn’t able to reach out to Marilyn. I was in Europe when she died. I think about her. I wonder if she’s found peace. If she knows—or cares—how much she’s loved. And how fondly I remember her. I hope she knows that.
