by Tony Curtis
From the beginning, Marilyn was difficult. She refused to wear the clothes the wardrobe department gave her. She demanded that she use only her own makeup. Her hair had to be the way she wanted it. She was so unreasonable in so many different ways that we weren’t even sure she would last through the first week of shooting.
We began by filming the train sequence on the back lot at MGM. This was Marilyn’s first shot, when she comes walking down the platform holding her ukulele and boards the train. It sounds simple, but Marilyn was very unsure of herself. Before we rolled film, she was walking down the platform rehearsing the shot, and Billy was directing her. About twenty feet behind him stood Paula Strasberg. As I watched, I could see Marilyn looking not at Billy but at Paula. Marilyn did this take after take. She might have been talking to Billy, but her eyes were always darting away toward his left, where Paula stood behind him. I thought, How interesting is this? Paula’s gonna direct the movie. She’s going to take over, and Marilyn will work only if Paula says so, and she’s gonna do only what Paula wants. God, if it turns out like that, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.
Finally it was time to start shooting. Billy bellowed, “Action,” and Marilyn started walking, and then she stopped before she hit the mark.
“All right, let’s do it again,” he said. I’d heard that Billy had a reputation for being harsh and unsympathetic on set. But here he was, with an actress who had given him so much trouble before a single frame of film got shot, and he was strictly business. No sign of emotion whatsoever. She went back and did it again.
“Cut,” Billy said, but the problem this time wasn’t Marilyn. “I don’t want the passerby crossing in front of her until after she gets past this point; I want the scene to be only about Marilyn,” Billy said. Strictly business; strictly practical. “All right, roll ’em.”
After the fourth or fifth take, Marilyn came down the platform perfectly, and Billy said, “Cut.” Marilyn looked over at Paula, and Billy turned around and looked at Paula too. He said to her, “How was it for you, Paula?”
Of course it was fine for Paula, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that Paula hadn’t pulled that scene out of Marilyn; Billy had, and everyone knew it. Billy asking Paula her opinion only made it more obvious. In that moment, any influence Paula might have had on the movie simply vanished. The company didn’t rally behind her; Billy had simultaneously taken Marilyn in hand and cut Paula out of the loop. You had to admire the way he worked.
Billy was that rare combination of an artist with a strong practical streak. There was one scene on a yacht when Marilyn was supposed to come into the stateroom and look for a bottle of bourbon. Paula’s direction would have been, “You’re coming into the room and looking for the thing that’s going to calm you down. Where could it be?” Billy would say, “The bourbon’s in the top drawer in the chest. Take three seconds looking for it, then find it.” Marilyn followed Billy’s direction, and she did it very well.
But the struggles with Marilyn weren’t over. Every now and then she would simply not show up for work for a couple of days, which is one of the worst things you can do in the movie world because it wastes everyone’s time and it wastes money. It also made everyone nervous: was Marilyn going to show up today, or wasn’t she?
Even after the first third of the filming was completed, the studio was considering shutting us down for a week, recasting Marilyn’s part, reconfiguring the story to work in the footage we’d already shot, and then going back to work. Most people on a movie set were expendable, including the stars. A classic example was when Jean Harlow collapsed on the set in the middle of filming Saratoga. She was taken to the hospital, but she died of kidney failure at the age of twenty-six, and the studio finished the movie by shooting over the back of a stand-in.
The producers could have easily replaced Marilyn, but everyone could see that she, in spite of herself, was conveying that funny, special quality she had that would sneak into a scene and make it great. Even in the rushes you could see that Marilyn lit up the screen.
After a week on the back lot, we began filming the beach scenes in San Diego at the Hotel del Coronado. Billy wanted to shoot at an actual hotel because he wanted Marilyn to live on site, thinking that would make it harder for her to refuse to show up for work. Unfortunately, things got worse between Billy and Marilyn after we got to San Diego. She’d come to work late; she wouldn’t know her lines. She put a huge strain on the entire company.
I went to Billy and said, “I’m having trouble sleeping because of all this shit with Marilyn.” He said he was too, and he had something that could help. He went into his hotel room and came back with a little bottle. He gave me the bottle and said, “These are French suppositories. Slip one in your tuchis and you’ll sleep all night.”
That night I inserted one of the suppositories and slept. The next morning Billy asked me, “Did you take the suppository?” I said yes. “How did it work?” he asked.
“My ass fell asleep instantly,” I said.
The problem with Marilyn was that the vulnerable quality that made her portrayal of Sugar so affecting on screen was also her biggest drawback. When she wasn’t being selfish or rude, she could be quite charming, and she didn’t lack for friends. Marilyn’s dressing room was adjacent to mine, and it was interesting to see who came to see her. Paula Strasberg came by a lot, of course, as did a friend of mine named Sam Bagley, an extra on the film. Sam was also good friends with Clark Gable. Sam was a character; he’d always carry a cigar and a big wad of bills, with a hundred-dollar bill on top and a stack of singles in the middle.
Visitors in the dressing room were one thing, but Marilyn didn’t like people visiting the set when we were filming. She would become enraged if a newspaperman, a member of the Mearish family, or even an assistant director walked in on us unannounced. From the time she got to the set to the moment she left, she’d go through a hundred and fifty different emotional changes. She just couldn’t relax. It was more than work; the problem was that she wanted to control every single man she met. De pending on the man, it was either “I love him” or “I hate him.” But she was incapable of not paying attention to a man. She felt she had to play to every one.
I felt affection for Marilyn all through the picture. I knew her well enough—and was enough like her—that I understood how she was feeling. Being comfortable was just not something she did very well, although she seemed to be having fun during our love scene on the yacht in Some Like It Hot. We did that scene over and over, and I loved every take of it. We were revisiting the feelings we had had for each other years earlier, those dinners, those drives around town in my Buick convertible with Dynaflow Drive, and our times together in Howard Duff’s beach house. Once again we were incredibly young, and I knew that she was enjoying those memories as much as I was, although we never spoke of them.
During this time Marilyn was married to Arthur Miller, and every once in a while he would come to the set. He’d pull up in a limousine opposite the entrance to the stage, and he’d stand by the stage door and wait for Marilyn to finish work. You know what I’ve noticed? All the guys Marilyn went with looked like Abe Lincoln, every one of them: Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, Yves Montand, the whole lot. I think the look fascinated her. It wasn’t the Hollywood look, and it certainly wasn’t my aesthetic. They were all a little off-kilter in their looks, but they all were great talkers. Marilyn loved articulate men.
After about the third week of shooting, I heard rumors that Marilyn was pregnant. It was impossible to tell just from looking at her, but once the gossip mill started up, the producers began to get alarmed. How many months along was she? We finished the movie without mishap, but later on, after the movie wrapped and we went back for retakes, we heard that she’d had an abortion.
Marilyn continued to butt heads with Billy, and by the end of shooting he was furious with her. He had suffered from so much stress that his back had gone out. One night we were having dinner at my house, and Billy w
as so tense that he couldn’t get out of his chair. We helped him lie down in our bedroom, and Janet called a doctor to come and give Billy a muscle relaxant.
Sometimes Marilyn caused stress with her efforts to make a scene better. In one scene in Some Like It Hot, Marilyn and I are drinking champagne on the yacht, and then we start to become romantic. Marilyn has just come from singing at a nightclub, and she’s wearing a see-through dress. Orry-Kelly, the film’s dress designer, figured out how Marilyn could wear it in the nightclub by adding a little extra cloth to cover her nipples. Marilyn decided the scene on the yacht would work better without the cloth, but MGM got panicky about it. What if we shot the scene without the cloth, and then the censor bureau said they wouldn’t allow it? But Marilyn insisted that she wouldn’t do it any other way. As she became more and more important to a picture, she exerted more and more control. She got her way, and I guess Billy got creative with the lighting during the shot, because the censor board didn’t say anything.
Marilyn and I had a lot of scenes together, and as we spent time together she began to turn to me more and more for support. If Marilyn felt she was having trouble, she looked to me to become her co-complainer. Her trouble became my trouble. If she felt there was too much noise on the set, she’d look at me, and I’d say, “Yeah, too much noise on the set.” Or we’d be doing a scene, and right in the middle she would look at me and say, “How’s my makeup?”
I’d say, “It looks good.” That wasn’t a line in the script, need less to say. Then she’d keep right on going.
There were times when I walked onto the set and Marilyn would be sitting in one of the director’s chairs with her name on it. She’d catch my eye, and so much would happen between us in those few moments we looked at each other that I felt like I had had a whole love affair with her before I even sat down.
She enjoyed it when I would visit her in her dressing room. I’d knock on her door and say, “Hello, Marilyn. It’s me.” She’d invite me in, and I’d say, “I hope you don’t mind my coming in. I just want to sit here quietly before Billy calls us.”
She’d say, “Please, sit down.” I’d sit there relaxing while she read her script. That was all. We’d sit together ten or fifteen minutes, until Billy called for the cast, and we’d come out. I really liked those moments we had together. They meant a lot to me, and I could see she enjoyed them too. They seemed to make her a bit calmer. Every time I looked at her she would be smiling at me.
Before we shot the romantic scene on the yacht where Marilyn was going to cure me of my impotence, she was in her dressing room, and she asked to see me. She had opened a bottle of champagne, and she wanted us to get a little loose before we shot the scene. I had one glass, but I wouldn’t drink any more, knowing my limits when it came to booze. She had another glass and murmured, “If it could only be like what we had before.” I knew what she meant; it was the first time either of us had openly acknowledged what we had once meant to each other. I gave her a long kiss, and she seemed to relax a little bit. I was glad for that, because this was going to be a difficult scene.
By the time we shot the scene, Marilyn was into it. When we kissed, I was on the receiving end of her tongue, and of her grinding. I had a hard-on (but don’t tell anybody) all through that scene, and she knew it, which made her even more aggressive. She knew I wasn’t acting when I expressed my desire for her. She could feel it—in more ways than one—and when Billy yelled “Cut,” she pushed herself off me and gave me a big, satisfied smile.
In the end it turned out that we all had misunderstood Marilyn. We knew that she was a powerful woman and a consummate actress, but we didn’t realize that her way of finding out who she was came from acting. In her early career, her films were flimsy, poorly written affairs, so of course she had trouble getting a handle on the material. But in Some Like It Hot the material was beautifully written, and she absolutely shone.
After the scene in which Marilyn and I were kissing, some of the crew and I stood around to watch the rushes, and afterward they wanted to know what it was like to kiss her. I figured a question that stupid deserved a stupid answer, so I flippantly responded by saying, “Kissing Marilyn is like kissing Hitler.” I was right—it was a stupid answer. What I should have said was, “What do you think kissing her is like, birdbrain?” Or I could have had the good sense to just say nothing. But my thoughtless comment became public knowledge, and the story still makes the rounds. So let me use this book to set the record straight once and for all: I hated Hitler. This is the kid who threw condom-bombs on the pro-Nazi parades, remember? I loved Marilyn Mon roe. And she was a terrific kisser.
After Some Like It Hot wrapped, I saw Marilyn again at Peter Lawford’s house at the beach. A lot of her friends were there. We talked for a minute, but somehow working with her on Some Like It Hot had brought a sense of completion to my feelings for her. The more we talked, the more I realized another love affair had bitten the dust. It seemed like working with me had changed things for her too, or maybe it just represented the natural end of something we’d shared. When I saw her at Peter’s party, she was really out of it. She looked like death warmed over, which saddened me, but I knew there was nothing I could do about it.
When I was invited to attend the Moscow International Film Festival, the government liaison for the event asked me to bring a copy of Some Like It Hot with me so they could show it at the festival. The studio arranged for all the clearances, so I embarked on the long flights from California to London to Moscow. At the festival, a giant screen had been set up at one end of a huge gymnasium, and on one unforgettable night the bleachers were packed with people watching Some Like It Hot without benefit of subtitles. Fortunately for some, a translator stood by the screen with a microphone, translating the dialogue as the movie went along. At the end of the movie, when Joe E. Brown learns that Jack is a man and says, “Nobody’s perfect,” the gymnasium exploded with laughter. You know a joke is good when it translates into another language without losing any of its punch.
I had never thought it was that amusing for guys to dress up like women. I had seen pictures of Eddie Cantor dressed as a ballerina, and I didn’t find that very funny. But when Some Like It Hot was finished, I was overwhelmed by how good it was. The dialogue, the photography, Marilyn’s character, Jack’s character, and the way my role turned out: I was very pleased with all of it. At times during the making of the film I had felt discouraged by the thought that Jack and Marilyn had the most interesting parts, and that I was just playing the straight man for the two of them. It felt good to see my own work holding its own with all the wonderful acting in that movie.
In the end, Jack Lemmon got an Oscar nomination for his acting in Some Like It Hot, which was richly deserved, but my heart ached that I didn’t get nominated too. I loved the overwhelming reaction my role generated from my fans; don’t get me wrong, that was very important to me. But all of us who work in the movie business long for the special recognition from our peers that comes with an Academy Award. Nothing. Nothing?
The End of a Marriage
Kelly, me, and Janet, 1958.
After I completed Some Like It Hot, Universal asked me what I wanted to do next. By this point in my career I had some leverage, so I said, “I want to make a submarine picture with Cary Grant.” After all, Cary Grant’s role as a submarine captain in Destination Tokyo had inspired me while I was in the submarine service. Cary agreed, with the proviso that after seven years he would own the movie. The studio bought in too, and so it was that Operation Petticoat came into being.
The movie, directed by Blake Edwards, was the story of a submarine that had been sunk in the Philippines at the beginning of World War II. It was raised from the bottom and ordered to make its way to Australia to be refitted for combat. On one Philippine island the sub picks up a bunch of nurses. On another island the sub is painted pink, in the absence of either enough red or enough white paint to cover the entire hull. Cary plays the sub commander, and I play his
supply officer, a con man who will go to any lengths to keep the ship running. The nurses create a lot of trouble for the crew, of course. In one scene, Cary is at the conning tower getting ready to fire the sub’s only torpedo at a Japanese ship while Joan O’Brien, playing one of the nurses, is talking to him about the value of taking vitamins. She bumps into him just as he says, “Fire one,” and the torpedo runs across Tokyo Bay and blows up a truck on the shore.
Cary’s character eventually ends up with Joan, and I end up with Dina Merrill. This was the third movie Blake Edwards and I made together, and by this time we were great friends. He and his wife spent many an evening with Janet and me. Blake and I were about the same age, and we were both very caught up in our manhood; one drunken night we went so far as to see whose dick was too big to fit through the hole of a 45 rpm record. As best I can remember, neither of us won that contest, but another time Blake and I asked a girl we had both dated which one of us was better in bed. She re plied, “I’ll never tell,” which was smart of her, and good for our friendship.
A year after Blake made Operation Petticoat, he started casting for the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. After I read the script, I felt I was perfect for the lead. I called Blake, and he invited me over to his office at the studio. I told him how much I wanted the part, and he danced around the issue for a while. Finally he told me, “I’ll do what I can,” but whatever he did turned out not to count for much. After that meeting I never heard from Blake again. George Peppard, a wonderful guy, got the part. But, sadly, the silence from Blake hurt me a lot.
There were other important parts I didn’t get. Audrey Hepburn made a picture called Two for the Road that I would have loved to be in, but Albert Finney got the lead I was hoping for. I was pretty sure Audrey liked me, but later I heard that when my name did come up, Audrey’s husband, Mel Ferrer—who made those decisions for her—didn’t want me in the picture. That’s how Hollywood works; it’s all about relationships. They can make you, and they can break you. If you’re around long enough, they’ll do both.
