by Tony Curtis
When people invited me to parties, I’d say, “Can I bring my friend Harry?” The place would be crowded with good-looking girls, and we’d work the room like nobody’s business. I’d be with this one girl, and I’d look across the room and he’d be with another one, and we’d nod to each other. I loved sharing that moment with him.
Another thing I had in common with Harry was a tendency to get depressed. Knowing that feeling only too well, I could recognize it when Harry had a bad case of the blues. I’d sit down next to him and say, “Come on, Harry. I know what you’re dealing with, and I’m here for you. Come on. Pull out of it.” I knew how he was suffering, and I knew he appreciated my support.
One evening we were putting on a performance at the school when a group of toughs from the surrounding neighborhood came in to harass us. How they got in, I don’t know. They were fifteen or sixteen years old, a gang of young hoodlums. When I came out on stage, I could hear them rustling in the back seats. One guy screamed out, “Hey faggot! Fairy! Yoo-hoo!” We didn’t have any security, so I stopped in the middle of my line and said, “Fuck off, get out of here,” in the toughest voice I could muster. Then Harry and Walter and a couple of teachers walked over and told them they had called the cops, so the kids took off.
I was still standing on stage, so I said to the audience, “Excuse me, please.” I calmly turned around to the girl I was in the scene with and gave the next line in the play, like I imagined a real pro would do it. Slowly, surely, I was learning.
I was also becoming more experienced with the ladies. One afternoon I met this beautiful girl on the street. I chatted with her, and we went up to her apartment. She was a few years older than I was and a real stunner. After we made love, she told me her boyfriend was Bobby Thomson, the outfielder for the New York Giants. I was still in bed with her when the phone rang. She answered and said, “Hi, Bobby, how are you?” She talked to this great ballplayer while I was snuggling next to her in bed!
As the spring semester was coming to a close, I saw a notice on the bulletin board that there was an opening for an actor with the Stanley Wolf Players. It was a non-union job, which made it possible for me to apply. Wolf had been a Broadway producer, but he had fallen out of favor with the powers that be in the New York theater world, so he created a drama troupe that played the Borscht Belt resorts in the Catskill Mountains. I went to meet Stanley in his office in Manhattan, and he hired me on the spot. We would be going out on the road for the whole summer. My pay was to be forty bucks a week.
To make a stage for us, the hotels would clear away the dining room tables and set up folding chairs for the audience. We did the same play everywhere we went. It was This Too Shall Pass, a play about anti-Semitism and the Jewish experience in America. The audiences always seemed to like it, so we played it every night: three nights in one hotel, four nights in another.
There were five of us in the cast, three guys and two girls, and we all got very close. That was what being on the road in the Catskills was all about. We’d play the hotels at night, and during the day we were expected to circulate among the hotel guests, so that’s what I did. To me the Catskills was female guests in bathing suits and all the food you could eat. In the evenings, we put on the play. It was a great experience, heightened by the knowledge that it wouldn’t last beyond the end of the summer.
In smaller hotels, we slept in cots in the corridors near the kitchen. There was usually a bathroom down the hall, and the strong smell of food all through the night. At the bigger hotels, sometimes we’d be lucky enough to get our own rooms. I’ll never forget one night when I got lucky, and I do mean lucky. I’d been given my own room, right next to one that was being shared by my two fellow actresses. A door with locks on both sides separated us. I was twenty-two, and they were a little older than I was, but not by much. At the time we were all a little crazy.
After the performance that night, I knocked on the door between the rooms. The girls unlocked their side and invited me in. As I entered, one of the girls left to go into my room. The girl who stayed behind started to undress and made it clear she wanted me to do the same. We got in bed together and had sex, and after we were done, I went back in my room and did it with the other one! Incredible! I was able to have great sex on both sides of that door! We shared those adjoining rooms for only two nights, but it was sweet while it lasted.
I liked my part in This Too Shall Pass. Stanley also put on The Jazz Singer, and I had the Al Jolson role, although I didn’t have to do much singing. It was a cut-down version of the full play, which moved from one scene to the next without the musical number in between. I was disappointed that I wasn’t allowed to do more, but I was glad they didn’t ask me to do the full play. Not only would that have been taxing, but I was probably the wrong guy for the part. Wolf knew what he was doing. He had been in the business for a long time.
While I was performing in This Too Shall Pass, Oscar Osker-off, who ran the Yiddish Theater in Chicago, came to see the play. This Too Shall Pass was very Jewish, and he loved me in it, so he asked me to come to Chicago and perform in his company. He said he’d bump my salary to sixty-five dollars a week, so I took the job.
He also wanted me to change my name. He said, “If I put you on the stage as Bernie Schwartz, everybody is going to think I got an Italian boy from the neighborhood and changed his name to Bernie Schwartz. So I’m going to call you Bernie White.” I didn’t understand his logic, but it was his nickel, so I agreed. After I arrived in Chicago, Oscar also said he wanted me to marry Henreyetta Jacobsen, an actress in the company, so we could become the reigning couple of Jewish theater. He offered to increase my salary to a hundred and fifty dollars a week if I’d do it. At first I wasn’t sure he was serious, but to my astonishment it turned out that he was.
Henreyetta was a nice enough young woman, but certainly not someone I wanted to marry. She didn’t exactly remind me of my mother, but she was much too close for comfort. Throughout my whole life I’ve had one overriding philosophy: Don’t marry someone who reminds you of your mother. And I’m happy to report that I never did. So to Oscar’s great disappointment, I turned him down.
Oscar’s play opened with me, playing a kid, running into the house. I’m dressed in short pants and a cap so I look about twelve years old. My father in the play, acted by Menachim Rubin, is eating dinner. Rubin was a real character in real life. He would carry around a little cotton bag with his gallstones in it. He loved to show them off. In the play, I would say, “Look what I made, Dad. I earned a quarter cleaning someone’s basement.” With that, Rubin slaps me in the face, taking altogether too much pleasure in the job. Every night this guy almost knocks my head off, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Then he says to me, “Listen, you’ll never have to work like that. I want you going to college. I want you to become an attorney or a doctor—no cleaning anybody’s house.”
The curtain closes, and when it opens again I’m lying in my pajamas on a couch reading the funnies. My mother, played by Gertrude Berg, says to me, “Listen, things are tough for your father. I thought maybe you could go get a job.” I say, “No way. I’m going to go to college, just like Dad wants me to.”
Then my father enters. He says, “A funny thing happened to me today on the way home from work. I told somebody I worked for the Metropolitan Insurance Company, and they thought I said, ‘The Metropolitan Opera.’” Then someone in the audience would scream, “Menachim, sing for us what you sang for them!” And he’d stop and sing an aria from Figaro.
At the end of the play, he and my mother come over to where I’m lying on the couch in my pajamas, and my father says to me, “Son, things are not too good lately. I don’t have that much work anymore.”
“No, Menachim, oy,” the people in the audience are screaming.
Finally he says to me, “Son, I think you’re going to have to go to work.”
I get up from the couch, fold the comics, and walk straight down to the edge of the stage. I look at the au
dience, and I say in Yiddish, “I would rather die.”
The audience starts to boo, and then I begin to ad-lib in Yiddish and say, “I would rather be in the movies!” It wasn’t part of the play, and the audience didn’t quite know what to make of that, but I got a kick out of saying that line every night.
Oskeroff had promised me good parts, but the snooty kid who was too good for his parents wasn’t an auspicious start. In the second play, I played a boy selling newspapers; that’s all I did. So after the first performance of that play, I wrote Oscar a letter: “Dear Mr. Oskeroff: This part is something I cannot play. It’s too complicated.” I signed the letter and left it for him. Then I went to the house where I was renting a room and threw everything I had into a sheet. I tied the sheet up, threw it over my shoulder, and left. After hitchhiking to see some relatives in Cleveland, I eventually made my way home.
I returned to the Dramatic Workshop to find my buddies Walter Matthau and Harry Belafonte still there, much to their chagrin. Walter and I starred in a production of Twelfth Night, where I played Sebastian, the brother of Viola. I had been taking speech lessons, which made it possible for me to do Shakespeare, hitting each one of the words properly. Another play we put on was Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy, about a boxer named Joe Bonaparte who plays the violin. At one point in the play, Joe goes out and gets himself a fight to make some money. When his father finds out, he goes nuts. The play was somewhat like This Too Shall Pass and The Jazz Singer.
The Cherry Lane Theater, a professional theater connected to the New School, had scheduled the production of a play for the coming weekend, but it fell through, so they asked the staff at the Dramatic Workshop if they had something that might take its place. The teachers said they had this kid, Bernie Schwartz, who was playing Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy and doing a good job of it. The Cherry Lane was thrilled. What they didn’t know was that we’d worked on only the first two-thirds of the play. The next thing I knew, my teachers came to me and said, “We’re going to open Golden Boy at the Cherry Lane Theater for a weekend, and you’ve got five days to learn the rest of it.”
But I didn’t mind. “I’m ready,” I said. And I was. By this time I had enough experience to know what I could and couldn’t do. Besides, I loved the play, and the role was perfect for me. It allowed me to play a tough, pugnacious kid who had an artistic side. (Sound familiar?) For five days we rehearsed six to eight hours a day at the school. We’d go to Central Park for a lunch break, and I would sit in the grass and learn my lines. I loved learning lines. It didn’t come naturally to me, but I loved doing it anyway, and eventually I got pretty good at it.
By the time the play opened on Friday night, I had it down well enough so that when I hit the stage, I wasn’t nervous at all. I was enjoying the atmosphere and getting into the part. Everything went off like a charm. We did our weekend of performances; then it was over, and I went back to school.
On that first Monday after Golden Boy finished its run at the Cherry Lane, I went to see a theatrical agent named Joyce Selznick, who worked for one of the smaller talent agencies. It turned out she was the niece of David Selznick, the legendary producer of Gone With the Wind.
When I went to see Joyce, I wanted to seem taller, so I took a deck of cards, cut it in half, and put half in one shoe and half in the other. I also wore high-backed shoes so I wouldn’t look strange from behind. When I asked Joyce if there was any way I could get into the movies, she said she’d call me if something came up. I’d heard that a lot, but at least she actually wrote down my number, which was something.
The very next morning Joyce called me and asked me to come back to her office. When I got there, she told me she thought I was very handsome and that I would be great in the movies. Then she took me to see David Selznick. I went into his office, and we talked briefly before he said to Joyce, “He’s a handsome boy, but he walks funny.” That deck of cards was making me lean forward. I gave him credit for noticing.
Then Joyce said to me, “I’m going to take you over to the New York offices of Universal Pictures. Bob Goldstein’s in town, and Bob is the talent scout for Universal. His brother, Leonard, runs the Universal studio in LA.”
I went down to Bob Goldstein’s office to meet him. We talked for a minute or two, and then I left. I didn’t think much of it, because Goldstein didn’t seem terribly interested.
A couple of days later, I got a call at home. A woman named Eleanor was calling from the Universal Pictures offices in Manhattan, asking me to come back down there right away. I was startled, but I hopped on the subway. When I got to the office, Eleanor ushered me into Bob Goldstein’s office. He said, “Somebody from our office saw you in Golden Boy.”
“That was this past weekend,” I replied.
“Yes,” he said, “and he thought you were excellent. I’d like to send you to California for a screen test.”
I was stunned. I called Joyce Selznick to see if she’d represent me in my negotiations with Universal if I passed my screen test. But Joyce said, “I can’t afford to go to California and set up shop to look after you. Maybe later, but not right now. But don’t worry about it, kid, you’ll have no trouble finding an agent when you get to LA.” Joyce never did represent me, but I was always deeply indebted to her.
This was 1948, and most of the actors in the movies at that time were in their thirties, forties, and fifties. There were no young people in the movies, so when the war ended, the studios needed to hire some fresh talent. In the past, most actors started making movies in their thirties and had short careers, but the studios were coming to realize that if they hired very young actors and signed them to long-term contracts, they could both replenish their talent and get it more cheaply. It was during this postwar period that the studios signed such actors as Robert Wagner, Piper Laurie, Janet Leigh, and Natalie Wood, who had started as a kid actor. Marlon Brando, of course, was part of the new generation as well. Marilyn Monroe was also on the verge of becoming America’s favorite pinup girl.
And now it was my turn. I took the screen test and was offered a seven-year contract with six-month options starting at seventy-five dollars a week. I knew Universal Studios was a low-budget operation, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to get into the movies.
An hour before I had to board the flight, I grabbed my piece of luggage and took a trolley car over the bridge to Queens. Glancing over my shoulder at Manhattan, I suddenly felt a pang to be leaving that I hadn’t felt when I had gone into the Navy.
When I got to the airport I bought my ticket and sat quietly in the lounge, eyeing all the pretty girls, wondering which ones I could get to smile back at me. Then I stared out the window at the ground crew working on our airplane. To me, its big, gleaming body looked like the future.
Dancing with Yvonne De Carlo
Jim Best, me, Rock Hudson, and Richard Long, 1949.
Soon after I signed with Universal, the casting department worked out a deal with a speech instructor over at MGM Studios to take me on as one of her students. The studio wanted me to improve my diction and to soften my New York accent, so I went to speech class. I didn’t go for very long, but I enjoyed the experience. We’d have to recite sentences like “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain,” the way Eliza Doolittle did in My Fair Lady. Our instructor even gave me marbles to put in my mouth, to make me more aware of my tongue and its movements. I swallowed one of the marbles by accident, and when it came out a few days later I washed it carefully and sent it to my instructor in a little box. She had no idea of the trip it had taken.
I loved going to the MGM lot for my speech class. I had seen a lot of MGM’s great movies as a kid, and on the lot I could even pick out certain streets and connect them to specific films. MGM was founded in the 1920s, and its first great epic film had been Ben-Hur. Among its roster of stars were Greta Garbo, William Powell, Buster Keaton, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Clark Gable. MGM would go on to make wonderful musicals starring Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Gene Kel
ly, and Frank Sinatra.
After my very first speech lesson, I went to get some lunch at the MGM commissary. I sat down in an empty spot at the counter next to a couple of girls who were eating together and chatting. One of the girls greeted me in a friendly way, so I struck up a conversation.
“I’ve never been here before,” I said.
“You’ll love the food,” she replied, and we chatted for a minute. She was a pretty, articulate young woman who seemed very intelligent and sure of herself. I wondered if she was an actress. I asked her if she worked at MGM, and she said she did.
“I’m going to be coming out here again for class. Can we have coffee?” I asked her.
“Sure,” she said. She took out a pen and a piece of paper, and when I saw the name she wrote out—Judy Garland—I nearly plotzed. I took her number, but I never called her. To this day I’m sorry I passed up a chance to become friends with the woman who’d been so phenomenal in The Wizard of Oz. But Judy Garland was a big star, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence at that point.
Those first few months in Hollywood I met a number of other young actors who were making names for themselves, including Debbie Reynolds, Rock Hudson, and Marlon Brando. At the studio various actors would get together and talk about what they were doing over the upcoming weekend. After a while we all knew each other, either from parties or from working together. Rock Hudson was signed shortly after I was. The two of us hit it off, became friends, and went on to become mainstays at Universal Pictures. Marlon Brando and I also developed a friendship from spending time together at parties, but he was always the odd one. He’d come to a party late, or he would show up but insist on not coming inside, or he’d bring some weird girl with him as his date. He was always pushing the envelope.
