by Tony Curtis
My Teenage Bride
With Christine Kaufmann on our wedding day, 1963.
© GETTY IMAGES/ERNST HAAS
Janet left Argentina because she had a movie to make, but the reason for her leaving as quickly as she did may have been jealousy of my beautiful young costar, Christine Kauf mann, who played my love interest in Taras Bulba, a Ukrainian version of Romeo and Juliet. I was playing Andrei, Yul Brynner’s son, a Cossack who falls in love with a Polish princess. The Cossacks and Poles are enemies, and to make our love affair even more complicated, I kill her brother in a sword fight. What no one knew at the time was that I didn’t have to act in my love scenes with Christine, because I really did fall in love with her.
To make the situation even more ticklish, Christine was only seventeen years old. That gave me pause, but there was a freshness about her, an exuberant joy in living that made me go all funny inside. To me, she represented all those girls I would have liked to have dated when I was a poor kid living in New York. I had never gone out with a girl like that, and now I was playing love scenes opposite one.
If Janet and I had been getting along, I might not have been so emotionally vulnerable, but that was not the case. Needless to say, the fact that my marriage was not in good shape meant that Janet and I rarely had sex, which didn’t help either. Christine made life fun again, and I wanted to be with her in the worst way. My dream came true when Christine and I launched into a torrid affair for the first three weeks of shooting. Then her mother arrived on the set, at which point she and I agreed to bury our feelings and stop seeing each other.
That wasn’t the only off-screen drama that was taking place during production. Yul Brynner disliked me because he’d wanted top billing, but United Artists had given it to me. Brynner was very pretentious and overbearing, not unlike the characters he played in his film roles. It got back to me that Yul was telling people I wasn’t a good enough actor to play the part of his son. Yul’s wife also made clear her distaste for me. On location she would bring a big pitcher of orange juice to the cameraman and the boom operator, and she was very obvious about not offering me any. I just shook my head.
Yul smoked all day long, and he had a lackey whose job was to light his cigarettes. When Yul was talking, he’d pull out his long cigarette holder, insert a cigarette, and then nod, which was the signal for his man to walk over and light him up. It was just another way for Yul to publicly demonstrate his power. He used this ritual to assert himself when he talked with the director, J. Lee Thompson. He’d say, “I don’t think the scene will work this way, Lee. Why don’t you have the horses come in from the other side instead?” Then he’d pull out a cigarette and wait for it to be lit.
After a while, I couldn’t take Yul’s behavior anymore, so I went out, bought an eyedropper, filled it with water, and brought it to the set. I stood behind Yul and waited for his servant to walk over to light his cigarette. After the cigarette was lit and Yul took a puff or two, he’d set it down in an ashtray. I’d tiptoe over, squeeze a couple of drops of water onto the end of the cigarette, and put it out. When Yul went to take another puff, the cigarette would be dead. After three days of this, Yul was about ready to kill his servant. I didn’t want to be responsible for Yul firing the guy, so I finally let Yul in on what I was doing. I have to give him credit: he laughed.
Another actor who didn’t like me was a bit player named Mickey Finn, a guy who weighed in at an impressive two hundred and eighty pounds. One day Mickey was sitting on his horse teaching a couple of other actors how to fence, and he said, “It’s like throwing confetti.” When I heard that load of horseshit, I realized Mickey had no idea what he was talking about, and I just had to correct him.
“You can’t do it that way,” I said. “You have to get close.” I got on my horse, rode up right alongside a mounted soldier, and struck him twice with my sword before he finally parried. I said, “That’s what you’ve got to do.” When one of the riders followed my example, I said, “You’ve got it.” Mickey became furious that I was showing him up, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it because my suggestion worked. I’d had a lot of experience fencing in movies.
One night at a cocktail party Mickey decided to vent his frustration by picking a fight with me. He came at me like a gorilla. I just stood there, thinking, If you want to kill me, give it your best shot, Mickey, but if you so much as touch me, you’re out of a job. I was the star of the picture, which meant I could have easily seen to it that Mickey was fired. I prepared to defend myself using some self-defense moves that my stuntman friends had taught me. Perry Lopez, who was playing my brother in the film, alertly jumped in between Mickey and me, preventing what could have been a very ugly scene.
J. Lee Thompson, our director, had directed a huge hit the year before: The Guns of Navarone. He was a forceful director who knew how to control a set. When we had to shoot some military scenes, he contacted the head of the Argentine army and said, “We need two or three battalions out here for a week, and we’ll pay you thirty thousand dollars.” The next thing I knew, we were dressing two thousand Argentine soldiers as Poles. We’d shoot a Polish army scene, then the shot assistant would say, “All right, let’s get these Poles turned into Cossacks.” An hour later, thousands of soldiers who had been Poles would come riding onto the set as Cossacks.
After we were through filming in Argentina, the entire cast and crew flew back to Hollywood to finish the picture on United Artists’ back lot. Christine’s mother came along, and I went home to Janet. Christine and her mother were both staying at LA’s Chateau Marmont, but I knew they were staying in separate rooms. I desperately wanted to be with Christine, but I knew the situation was fraught with danger.
I came up with a plan that involved driving up to the Chateau Marmont at five thirty in the morning. Christine would let me into her room, and we’d have our fun until about eight thirty. Then I would leave and go directly to the set, making sure her mother didn’t see me on the way out. When Christine and I met on the set that morning, we’d greet each other as if for the first time that day. The sneaking around made our trysts even more romantic.
I may have been fooling Christine’s mother, but Janet could tell something was up. She came by the UA lot one day when we were shooting and said something odd to me: “I want to see this Christine girl.”
“What are you asking me for?” I said. “Go on the set and see her.”
“Will you introduce us?” she asked.
“If I’m around, I’ll introduce you, sure,” I said. Janet was letting me know she suspected something was going on, but she didn’t come right out and accuse me. I couldn’t bear living with Janet anymore, so I often stayed overnight with Nicky Blair, a friend of mine who owned a restaurant in LA, or with Hugh Hefner. Whenever I needed to get away, Hef would let me stay in one of his rooms.
One night Janet and I were at home, having one of our terrible fights. Janet was drinking scotch and crying while she was trying to fix her makeup in front of a little mirror. There was a bottle of pills on her dressing table next to the mirror, and while I was standing there she opened the bottle, shook a handful of red pills into her palm, and threw them down her throat. In a panic, I slapped her hard on the back, causing her to cough up most of the pills.
That was the last straw. Soon after, I told Janet I was moving out. At first she took it calmly. “So move out if you want to,” she said.
I packed a few clothes, and after I walked out the front door to my car, carrying a small valise, Janet came and stood in the doorway, holding Kelly by the hand and Jamie in her arms. She didn’t say much, but she was crying, and when I saw the two girls, my heart was torn apart.
I should have found a better way to end things with Janet, but I had run out of energy. So instead, I just left. I found a hotel close by, and I stayed there while I finished the movie. Janet and I had parted, and not on good terms. Sad to say, Kelly and Jamie have always held it against me. It’s understandable. Janet had full c
ustody of the girls, which was typical in those days, and I’m sure she filled their heads with all sorts of negative stories about me.
Meanwhile, the movie magazines were buzzing with rumors about Christine and me. One day I got a message on the set saying that Hedda Hopper was calling. I got on the phone, and Hedda said to me, “Listen, Tony, God help you if you lie to me, but are you going with a teenager?”
I said, “No, Hedda, that’s not true at all.”
All that did was postpone the inevitable. The story of Tony Curtis leaving his wife and two kids for the teenage daughter of a German air force officer made every newspaper in America. The media frenzy made Janet even more bitter, if that was possible. She was being humiliated in public, and she never forgave me for it. I managed to get visitation rights to see our daughters, but Janet often found ways to keep me from seeing them.
After the movie wrapped, Christine went back to Germany, and that cooled down the rumors about us, but we talked on the phone long distance every night.
After Janet and I separated, I made a movie called 40 Pounds of Trouble. The picture was about a five-year-old waif my character had taken in who tries to get me together with Suzanne Pleshette, the actress who would later become famous for her role on The Bob New hart Show. Suzanne was a Brooklyn native who’d gotten her start as a stage actress on Broadway. She had wowed the critics when she replaced Anne Bancroft in the stage production of The Miracle Worker, and now here she was in Hollywood, making movies. Like Christine, Suzanne was young and smart and beautiful, and I often wonder whether I might have fallen for her if I hadn’t already fallen for Christine.
We were the first company allowed to shoot a film in Disneyland, which had opened in Anaheim in 1955. We also filmed at the Cal-Neva Lodge near Reno, the place that Frank Sinatra owned as part of his under-the-table arrangement with mob boss Sam Giancana. Frank’s relationship with Sam Giancana was the reason that Jack Kennedy had been forced to cut Frank off as a friend after he got elected president. J. Edgar Hoover knew all about Frank’s mob friends, so he told Kennedy to keep Frank at arm’s length, which Kennedy did. That was very hurtful to Frank, who had been an important campaigner for Kennedy, and Frank never forgave Jack for turning his back on him.
Frank took his anger out on Peter Lawford, because Peter was married to Jack Kennedy’s sister Patricia. Frank had never been that crazy about Peter anyway. Peter was British, which he thought gave him special status, and he seemed to look down on the rest of us—especially me, whom he saw as some sort of New York gangster wannabe. Peter could also be rude. Sometimes Frank would be talking and Peter would interrupt him right in the middle of a sentence, and Frank would say, “What the fuck are you doing interrupting me? Shut the fuck up.” Once Jack Kennedy severed his ties to Frank, Frank turned right around and cut Peter Lawford out of his life completely. It was as if Peter no longer existed.
After 40 Pounds of Trouble wrapped, I got a call from director Richard Quine, asking me to do him a favor. Dick was making the movie Paris—When It Sizzles, starring William Holden and Audrey Hepburn, but Bill Holden had been drinking too much and had been forced to check into a rehab clinic partway through filming. Dick asked me if I would take a small part that they would write in for me, to reduce the amount of time that Bill had to be on screen. I agreed. I was happy to be working, but I was sad about Bill, because I admired him so much. It had been a stroke of genius for Billy Wilder to cast him in Sunset Boulevard. “No one else thought Bill could do it,” Billy had told me, “but in that movie he proved himself.” Billy had wanted a great performance of a guy going downhill, and he’d gotten it. Now Holden was going downhill in real life.
Paris—When It Sizzles didn’t have much of a story, which turned out to be helpful when they had to write me in at the last minute. I did a good job, but having me in the movie didn’t turn it around. After my part in the picture was finished, I flew to London, where I bought a Jaguar coupe and drove to Munich to see Christine, who was making a movie there. I checked into the Bayerischer Hof, a beautiful hotel where the cast was staying. I couldn’t wait to see her.
Christine was shooting nights, and Munich was chilly. I would go to her film location, park my car, and keep it running so the heater stayed on. Whenever Christine got a break, she would come and sit with me in the car. After a couple days of this, other cast members who were friends of Christine’s started joining us. On any given night we could have half a dozen people warming up in that car.
At the end of my fourth or fifth night of visiting Christine at the set, I drove back to the hotel and left the car with the doorman. Be fore I went inside, he said, “Can I show you something, Herr Curtis?” He walked me around to the back of the car and pointed: someone had jammed rags into both exhaust pipes. I was lucky I hadn’t died of carbon monoxide poisoning. I could see the headline: Tony Curtis gassed by Germans. I was sure somebody in the company had done it, perhaps because I was a Jew seeing a beautiful German actress.
Janet filed for divorce while I was away in Europe. I was making significantly more money than she was, so I gave her the house in Palm Springs and our house in LA. Things were bad enough between us; I didn’t want any more trouble over money. Also, I had two little girls to support, and I wanted to be sure they didn’t want for anything.
Janet remarried with remarkable speed, and in my ongoing desire to not make things worse between us, I agreed during the divorce settlement to pay one-third of all Janet’s expenses, which included whatever her new husband, Bob Brandt, spent. So here I was, paying a third of the cost of Bob’s toothpaste, Bob’s shaving cream, and Bob’s neckties. Could Janet have been seeing Bob behind my back? I never asked, and I didn’t want to know, especially if it was true. It was hard enough seeing her new husband move into the house I had bought with my hard-earned money, to live with my daughters, even though Bob was a nice guy.
Almost overnight, I went from being the happiest man in Hollywood to being miserable. I was in love with Christine, but now I felt my other problems were overshadowing the joy in our relationship. I had enjoyed being one of the most popular actors in town, but now I was roundly despised for having dumped Janet, who was very well liked. It was a terrible time for me. Anyone who tells you there’s no such thing as bad publicity has never lived life in the public eye when things take a turn for the worse. I suffered a lot as I kept asking myself, How did I get in a mess like this?
After the divorce, strict limits were placed on the amount of time that I was allowed to spend with Kelly and Jamie. If I wanted to take them to the beach, I had to ask permission. Sometimes I’d go over to the house and bring them little presents, but Janet or Bob or someone else would always be in the room, keeping one eye on the clock, and asking me to leave the moment the legally prescribed time had elapsed. The girls have blamed me for not spending as much time with them as they would have liked, but after a while the battle to see them just became too difficult.
To make things worse, Harold Hecht cheated me out of a big chunk of money from Taras Bulba. I was supposed to get a percentage of the profits, but after Harold’s creative bookkeeping, I got nothing. Not a penny. The studio would send Harold money, and after he paid expenses on location, he would fly to Buenos Aires and deposit the rest of the money in private bank accounts. According to Harold, the money owed me was spent on production. He was the one keeping the books, so he could say he spent whatever he wanted on expenses, lowball the net figure, and pocket the difference. How was anyone at the studio going to know what the real expenses were?
Getting my share of that picture would have changed everything for me, because now I was completely broke. I was paying for Janet and the kids, in addition to supporting my mother, father, and brother, not to mention my aunt and uncle back in Hungary. Then I got a flicker of hope: I was offered five hundred thousand dollars to make a film called Lady L for MGM, but the project fell through. And boy, did I need that money. I had painted myself into a corner, and I needed to find a
way out.
Through it all I did what Lew Wasserman had told me to do: I kept making movies. In 1963 I had made a film called Captain Newman, M.D., about an Army psychiatrist played by Gregory Peck. My character was a neurotic orderly whose antics forced Captain Newman to pay attention to his patients. It was a great part. Angie Dickinson played a nurse assigned to the ward, and Bobby Darin played a shell-shocked airman. He gave one of the worst performances I ever saw, and to my astonishment he was nominated for an Academy Award for that picture. To this day I can’t understand how that happened. Go figure that one out!
In 1963 I had also worked a little in a movie called The List of Adrian Messenger. A lot of big-name actors, including Burt Lan caster, Frank Sinatra, and Robert Mitchum, were signed along with me to play people suspected of being traitors during World War II. The idea was that the audience, having been presented with a number of possible culprits, all famous and all in heavy makeup to “disguise” them, had to try to guess whodunit. It was a clever gimmick. I played two bit parts: an Italian with an accordion, and an organ grinder with a monkey.
John Huston was the director, and he was a big worry to me. I knew he was incredibly talented, and because I’d never worked with him before, I just assumed he must have something against me. I figured he was probably saying to himself, That Curtis is a New York bum. I was so insecure sometimes. It turned out that I couldn’t have been more wrong about Huston. When I met him, I could tell right away that he liked me. He was appreciative and kind, and he put me completely at ease. Being in his movie meant a lot to me, given Huston’s extraordinary accomplishments.
On February 8, 1963, Christine and I were married in Las Vegas. Kirk Douglas was my best man. Kirk had made Town Without Pity with Christine, and he understood why I was so nuts about her. I was touched by how considerate and supportive Kirk was. Kirk’s extraordinary wife, Anne, was maid of honor. Anne loved the fact that I was marrying a European girl because Anne herself had been a reporter for a French magazine, which was how she met Kirk.
