by Tony Curtis
I also had a chance to practice my signalman skills. I would go out on a submarine, and when it surfaced after its dive I’d go topside and signal to the sub tender. After one of those training missions, we came back to Guam to learn that the war was over. After all that training I hadn’t seen a single shot fired in anger!
I did have an amazing moment on the Proteus when the U.S. fleet sailed into Tokyo Bay. The Japanese had surrendered, and on September 2, 1945, from the deck of my ship I was able to use my binoculars to watch General Douglas MacArthur, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Admiral William “Bull” Halsey sign the treaty to end the war with Japan.
After the ceremony our ship docked for twelve hours, and we were allowed to go ashore. While walking around a sub base about four hours from Tokyo, I discovered a cave filled with Japanese provisions, blankets, machine guns, and all kinds of equipment. I signaled back to the Proteus, and they sent a detail to come and collect everything. The captain shook my hand and congratulated me.
The Proteus chugged back to Guam and picked up some sailors, then we returned to Pearl Harbor, where the local girls greeted us like war heroes. A group of us visited wounded soldiers in a nearby hospital. There wasn’t much work to do during the day, so we figured we could use the time to do some good by going and keeping these guys company. Some of them had been sent here from other islands, and a few had been hurt in the original bombing of Pearl Harbor. Guys my age had arms and legs blown off. One guy named Steven had broken his back. We had a great conversation, so I went back to see him several more times while I was in Pearl Harbor.
Another, less selfless reason I kept going back to the hospital was a beautiful nurse from Wisconsin named Emma. She was older than I was, and she was both matter-of-fact and kind, in the way that good nurses often are. When she came on the ward and I saw her for the first time, I asked, “May I give you a hand?” She looked at me and said, “Come on.” I followed her to her station, where she gave me a tray of medicine to carry. Then we walked together from ward to ward as she visited the patients, and I gave out medications.
An evening with her at her apartment was my last great moment of the war. Not long afterward I got my orders home. From Hawaii we traveled through the Panama Canal up to Norfolk, Virginia, where a lot of us debarked. The Navy took us by train to Samson, New York, where the rest of us were discharged.
I had spent more than three years in the Navy. I was handed a modest check and my discharge pin, and later the Navy sent me a piece of paper in the mail saying I had served my country honorably.
I was twenty, and it was time for me to get serious about finding a way to get into the movies.
The Dramatic Workshop
In Guam during the war, 1944.
Once the war ended, I began making plans. I figured once I got home I would spend the first couple of months getting acclimated to civilian life. I had some dough, about seven hundred dollars in Navy pay that I had accumulated, plus another two hundred they gave each of us on discharge. That was enough so that I wouldn’t have to ask my parents for any money.
Once I was discharged in Upstate New York, I took a Greyhound down to New York City. After the bus pulled into the Midtown terminal, I called the house, and my mother got all excited when I told her I was in Manhattan and would be home soon. I hadn’t been home in more than three years. I took the shuttle over to the Lexington Avenue subway, and while I was standing on the platform with my duffel bag waiting for a train, a short, stocky man came up to me and said, “Welcome home, sailor.” I thanked him, and we started to talk. He said, “You know, you should be in the movies.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Maybe I will be one day.”
He said, “Do you have an agent? You’re gonna need one. I’ve got some connections in Hollywood. Would you like to come to my house for a drink?” Now I was starting to feel uncomfortable. It seemed pretty obvious that his interest in me was not purely professional, so I thanked him and took the train to my family’s house.
When I arrived home, my mother was standing outside the apartment building waiting for me, and we hugged. A woman walked by and said to us, “This is the first homecoming I’ve seen! Welcome home.” Being back felt very strange. My father was working downtown, and my little brother Bobby was now five years old. It didn’t take me long to see that nothing had changed except me. Only a handful of guys within a ten-block radius had joined the service. The ones who had stayed behind seemed terribly immature to me. The returning servicemen weren’t exactly sophisticated, but we were a lot more knowledgeable and worldly than our buddies who hadn’t gone anywhere or done anything. Even my family members seemed to have shrunk somehow.
My mother said, “So how was Paris?”
“Mom, I didn’t go to Paris,” I told her. “I went to Asia.”
My first day back I tried going out in my Navy uniform, but it didn’t attract too much interest, so I put it away. Instead I dressed up really nicely and went downtown, and this became a regular trip for me. Over the next few years I saw lots of Broadway shows using the trick I’d learned as a kid to avoid the steep ticket prices: I’d wait until the second act, and then I’d sneak in. I saw Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire that way. On stage Marlon worked with extraordinary ease—or at least he made it seem that way. He brought incredible personality and individuality to the role, and I found his work enthralling.
Marlon and I were about the same age, so seeing him on stage got me thinking about my own dreams. While I was watching him up there, my mind raced with questions: How do you get up there? What makes it happen? Do you have to have a natural talent, or special smarts, or can you go to school for this?
When the play ended I went outside, where I heard people buzzing with enthusiasm about what they had seen. Suddenly I felt a wave of sadness come over me. When I looked around me at the people who had been in the audience, I could see they had sophistication and intelligence. But not me. I didn’t know nuttin.
Back in the neighborhood I told everyone I knew that I was going to be in show business. Around this time I developed an obsessive interest in my appearance. I went to the pool regularly, and I worked hard on my physique. I was a good-looking kid, with my dark hair and light eyes. One day I found some peroxide and put it in my hair to lighten it, and my hair turned red. At the time a play on Broadway featured a cast of redheads, so when people asked me about my new hair color, I told them I was trying out for that play.
The consensus in the neighborhood was that I was a redheaded homosexual. Any guy who would dye his hair had to be peculiar. When the old women in the neighborhood who kept watch on everything saw me going out at night all dressed up, they started a rumor that I was working in a club where men dressed as women. How did that get started? What a bunch of meshuggena yentas.
Once I’d made my ambitions public, I had to deal with people in the neighborhood constantly asking me, “Well, how’s it going? Have you seen anybody?” By this they meant talent scouts, or agents, or casting directors. Again and again, my answer was, “Well, no, not yet.”
After a while I met a photographer who took some publicity photos of me and sent them to the Conover Modeling Agency. This was something that wasn’t done. Usually you went for an inter view and brought your pictures with you. When the photos arrived, the agency assumed I had already had an interview, so they called me to come in for a meeting. When I showed up, the agent asked me my name. I won’t say he was anti-Semitic, but I thought the temperature of his voice dropped after I told him I was Bernie Schwartz. In those days, Jews weren’t models, and models weren’t Jews. But to my surprise I did score a couple of modeling jobs from him. I even got on the cover of a magazine, which earned me a hundred bucks for a day’s work.
Those minor successes encouraged me, but they didn’t make up for the constant insecurity I felt. No matter what I did, I never felt okay, I never felt like I was good enough or that I belonged. My looks set me apart, but that wasn’t always good news. Sometimes I
thought my mother had been so quick to beat the hell out of me—and not Julie—because she couldn’t understand why I didn‘t look anything like her. My worn clothes set me apart too, even though my father made them look good as only a master tailor can. Hard as he tried, I always felt there was something threadbare about them. Maybe it wasn’t the clothes that were second class; maybe it was me.
After coming home from the war, I found that I still felt incomplete, which led me to behave strangely sometimes. On the one hand I was overly sensitive: I was always expecting to hear someone insult me for being a Jew, so I was quick to start a fight if I even suspected that someone was being rude to me. On the other hand, I found myself kissing up to people. I would laugh at jokes whether they were funny or not. I was always so attentive, hanging on the other person’s every word. If some guy mentioned his mother, I might say, “No kidding. You mean your mother is still alive?” even though the guy was only forty-seven years old. Of course she was alive. But I would make a big megillah out of it. I wanted people to like me, so I wanted to show them that I cared about their lives.
Unfortunately, my behavior often had the opposite effect. People could tell I wasn’t being genuine, and they were right. How could I be, when I felt so incomplete, like a pile of Legos that hadn’t yet been put together?
It was painfully clear that one piece of the puzzle that was missing was my education. Simply put, I didn’t have one. I knew I was smart; I had learned that in the Navy. But an education—knowledge that didn’t have to do with the Navy or submarines or being a signalman—that was something I just didn’t have. I hadn’t attended school much in junior high, and by the time high school came around I had already enlisted in the Navy.
After I came home from the Navy, I re-enrolled in Seward Park High School so I could get my GED; but once again, my attendance suffered. This time I wasn’t cutting class to climb the El trestles; now I was making the rounds of talent agents, trying to jump-start my show business career.
At first I’d just walk into a talent agency or a modeling agency and say to the girl at the desk, “May I speak to one of the agents?”
She’d reply, “Which one?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sorry, I can’t help you.”
After that happened a few times, I realized I needed to take a different tack, so I wrote to the big agencies and asked for a list of their agents. Once I had that list I could ask for a specific agent, which helped a lot; now I could ask specifically for “Mr. Lefkowitz” at the William Morris Agency, so I started getting in the door here and there. I made a point of spending six or seven hours each day looking for work. Then I’d head home, although some nights I’d stay downtown if I’d been invited to a party.
During this time I renewed my search for an alternative name to Schwartz. If I met a girl, I might tell her my name was David Street and see how she reacted. I was trying to find a name that would look good up on the silver screen.
Even though I went to class only occasionally, Seward Park gave me a GED, which made me eligible for two years of university, paid for by the GI Bill. The government gave you a list of schools you could attend, but when I went down the list I couldn’t find a single acting school. I saw plenty of schools for auto mechanics, but nothing for actors. I was terribly disappointed.
One night I went to a theater downtown to see a play, and a guy there told me that the Dramatic Workshop, which was part of the New School of Social Research on the West Side of Manhattan, was accepting students on the GI Bill. The school had been founded in 1940 by Erwin Piscator, an exiled German Jew; after he died, the school had been taken over by his wife. Hearing this, I just about ran over there.
When I inquired about enrolling, they told me the GI Bill would indeed cover the cost of going to school, but I would have to try out and be selected in order to attend school there. To try out you picked any monologue you wanted and performed it for the school faculty. That was fine with me, and I came back the next day for my audition.
When you’re trying out for a big-name acting school, of course you’re going to think about performing Shakespeare, but how was a guy like me supposed to wrap his tongue around those soliloquies? I didn’t want to do anything that would underscore my working-class Jewish background. In fact, I really didn’t want to talk at all, if I could avoid it. So I hit upon the idea of enacting a scene from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—in pantomime. If I didn’t speak, there was no way they could reject me for my accent, right? In total silence I came through a door onto the stage, opened a cabinet, took out chemicals, took the tops off, combined them judiciously, and, when I had the right mix, poured the potion down my throat. It was immediately obvious that something had gone terribly wrong with my experiment! Step by step I walked through the scene, miming each character.
I was accepted to the Dramatic Workshop and enrolled in February of 1947. I don’t think my skills at pantomime got me through the door. I think my audience saw just how badly I wanted to act and were compassionate. A lot of young GIs who went to that school were just scammers. They went through the motions so they could draw their GI Bill stipend of sixty bucks a month without having to get a job. Others came so they could learn a little diction or have some fun up on stage, but their hearts weren’t really in it—not like mine was.
The school was excellent. It had a theater, the President, on Forty-eighth Street, over on the West Side. Classes took place on the second floor. You got a sense of what it was like to be an actor just from taking classes with other students who had already had some theatrical experience. Not everyone studying there had talent, but some were very impressive—Walter Matthau, Harry Belafonte, Rod Steiger, and Bea Arthur among them. Marlon Brando had studied at the Dramatic Workshop the year before, and already Marlon was getting raves for his starring role in A Streetcar Named Desire, and I knew from having seen him just how richly he deserved them.
While I was going to acting school, I was living at home and taking the subway. I would leave the apartment at midday, get off the train at Forty-second Street, and walk over to Eighth Avenue, where the school was. It was a schlep, but I loved the chance to see people from different neighborhoods. On my way home I might run into someone I knew and we’d hang out together, go to a candy store or a pool hall. I loved the fact that in one part of town I could get corned beef and cabbage, and in another I’d find spaghetti and meatballs, and if I went all the way to Canal Street, I could eat Chinese food, which back then seemed very exotic.
Sometimes when I’d come home late at night the train didn’t seem like so much fun. The subway cars were empty and not always safe. Sometimes I’d see two or three tough-looking guys get on together and look hard in my direction. I knew that if they decided to mug me between stops, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I was never attacked, but I was often very aware of the possibility.
• • •
• • •
I wasn’t sure whether I’d made the right decision in coming back to New York and living at home with my parents. My mother and father were still fighting. My mother was still mentally ill, and it was starting to look like my younger brother Bobby had inherited some of her problems. As part of her ill ness, my mother was very paranoid. She would constantly question me: “Where were you? Where did you go last night? Is there really a school? Which school are you going to? What do you do at night?” She’d hear the local gossip, and it would bring out her worst fears.
After more than three years of living on my own in the service, I had become a lot better at handling my mother. When she started ranting, I just heard her out, nodded, and did whatever I wanted to. I wasn’t around home that much anyway. But when I was around, she would try to pick fights with me. My father stayed out of it, but I could see that he hated seeing her go after me.
It wasn’t long after I started acting classes that I was able to say to myself, I can do this. I was inspired by my own progress, and by the encouragement of my fellow actors, talent
ed people such as Walter Matthau. I liked being in classes with Walter. He was a little older than I was, twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and he had already worked off-Broadway. He had some acting experience, and he was kind enough to share what he’d learned.
Bea Arthur was a magnificent woman, highly intelligent, charming, and also very generous to anybody and everybody. She was a natural. We put on a play called Whistler’s Father, and she played Lysistrata, who arranged for all the women not to have sex with their husbands or boyfriends until they stopped the war. I played a married soldier, and Bea and I had a three-or four-minute scene where I tried to convince her that making love was the best thing to do, but she wouldn’t have any part of it. In the show I wore a sort of kilt and laced-up boots, and I carried a shield. When I came out on that stage, I could hear the girls in the audience go “Ooooh.” Hearing that sound helped boost my confidence.
Harry Belafonte was about my age. He had had a lot of additional hurdles to overcome simply because he was black. He wasn’t sure how much of a future he could have as an actor since there weren’t many good parts being written for black men, so he also maintained a career as a singer. Harry and I were very much alike—we were both outsiders. He was like a brother to me. We had a wonderful relationship. We’d hang out together and go to pubs down in the Bowery, where we were less likely to run into racial discrimination. Harry knew where he could go and where he couldn’t, so I just followed his lead.
We used to have dinner at one of the several Horn & Hard art’s Automats in New York. This was a chain of cafeterias where you put your money in a slot, a little window would open, and you took your food. Horn & Hardart’s cafeterias were safe for blacks because there was no maître d’ to tell you to get out. After dinner, Harry and I would go down into the subway, and while we were waiting on the platform for the train, he’d beat out a rhythm and sing. When we were with other guys, some of them would hum while he sang, “Daylight come and me wanna go home.” Even then he sounded great.
