by Tony Curtis
To get away from my mess with Penny, I spent three full months in 1980 with Hugh Hefner at his mansion. Hef was a steadying influence for me, the kind of guy I could tell anything to and he would understand. I was so vulnerable in those days that I fell for every girl I met at the mansion. There was hardly anyone around to take them out, and Hef didn’t want them floating around the city unescorted, so I always had a girl on my arm.
But there were boundaries, even at the Playboy Mansion. Romances were to be conducted on the grounds, not taken to a hotel room or to someone’s home. The idea was to have a place where you could have some wholesome fun, a place that wasn’t sleazy. Life at the mansion felt like being on a luxurious college campus. Guests enjoyed private talks in the garden or watched movies in Hef’s screening room. The girls were happy to spend time with me, and I behaved properly. I enjoyed their friendship, and where appropriate, I enjoyed romancing them. The pleasure of spending time with these beautiful girls and having them find me attractive calmed me and made me feel good. That was far more important to me than the sex.
During that time I got to know Dorothy Stratten, a really sweet, beautiful girl. I also met her husband, Paul Snider, whom I disliked immediately. There was something untrustworthy and disturbing about him. He was a tight-lipped man whose eyes darted around the room, but if someone came over to talk to him, he would instantly change into an affable, friendly fellow. Anytime Dorothy was talking to another man, though, he’d suddenly materialize, jealous as he could be. He never let her out of his sight.
Hef was ill at ease with Snider. Everyone could see that Dorothy was much too good for him. When the director Peter Bogdanovich met her, he was smitten, and they fell in love. But when Dorothy told Snider she wanted a divorce, he murdered her and killed himself. It was a terrible tragedy that no one could have predicted, although it was obvious to us all that Paul Snider was trouble waiting to happen.
When I wasn’t falling in love with one of the girls at the Playboy Mansion, I lived pretty much like a hermit. I spent most of my time in my room at the mansion, and occasionally I’d go down to a party or watch a movie. As the evening went on, if I didn’t feel like socializing anymore, I’d go back up to my room.
After Penny moved out and took our sons, Benjamin and Nicholas, with her, I left the mansion and went back to live alone in our condo. There I was, living in luxury, miserable, waiting for jobs that weren’t coming in. Many of my contemporaries had already prepared themselves for the day when they would no longer be called on to act. They had begun writing, directing, or producing.
Lew Wasserman had tried to encourage me along those lines, but I wasn’t interested. As far as I was concerned, directing a film didn’t have much appeal. For one thing, I didn’t think I was very good at it, and for another, it seemed a little like cheating or playing it safe. A director didn’t have to come up with the emotions that allowed an actor entry into a character’s inner workings. A director didn’t have to find a way to interact with another actor as if their characters were real people. To me, being in front of the camera was where the creativity in filmmaking lay, and that was all I was interested in. Unfortunately, at the moment that meant I wasn’t doing anything at all. When I first hit Hollywood, I had really made a splash. Now the phone was silent. It was as if I had died, only someone forgot to tell me about it.
It was during this time—the early 1980s—that I began dabbling with what had become a very fashionable drug in Hollywood and other major cities around the country: cocaine. When the cocaine craze hit, no one knew how addictive it could be. Everyone knew about the dangers of heroin, but people thought coke was something you could try when you felt like it and stop using whenever you wanted to. I’m sure that dealers encouraged that misconception.
I was introduced to cocaine during the making of Lepke. We were working long, grueling hours, and I was getting tired. Then one day a woman in wardrobe said to me, “Here, try some of this.” She took a small paper packet out of her pocket, opened it up, and shook some white powder out of it onto a mirror. She handed me a little straw and told me to sniff some powder up each nostril. Almost immediately, I felt comforted by a new sense of confidence, and I noticed that even though it was well past midnight, I was full of energy. I took another hit, kept the paper packet, and worked until four in the morning. The next day I paid the woman for more. It was the start of my descent into hell.
Before long, the cocaine epidemic wrecked Hollywood. Actors became so addicted that they demanded coke in their contracts. A friend of mine at Paramount told me a story about Dodi Al-Fayed, one of the producers of Chariots of Fire. Dodi’s father owned Harrods department store in London and was one of the richest and kindest men in the world. Dodi had told his father he wanted to be a Hollywood producer, and Dodi’s father had made it happen. Anyway, my friend recounted a conversation between Dodi and Bob Evans, the head of Paramount. Dodi told Bob, “I’m having trouble with one of the actors. He wants me to get him some cocaine, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“What don’t you know?” asked Evans.
“It’s so expensive,” Dodi said. “Where am I going to get the money?”
Bob said, “Well, just charge it to the transportation department.” Apparently finding ways to bury the cost of cocaine was common practice in Hollywood during that time.
Around this time I moved out of the modern condominium I’d shared with Penny and the boys, and into a small apartment. And I started doing cocaine on a regular basis. Once I began using heavily, I found myself involved with unsavory people I didn’t even know. When you’re hooked on drugs, you have no close friends, just druggie friends. That makes you feel totally alone, which makes you want to take drugs even more. It’s a vicious cycle.
My head wasn’t on straight, and although I knew it, I didn’t know what to do about it. The cocaine gave me a brief feeling of euphoria, which was the best feeling I could manage in those days. I told myself that if I controlled my use, and chose my friends more carefully, I’d be able to stop whenever I wanted to. As it turned out, it wasn’t so easy.
One of the big reasons I started using cocaine was that I was told it was great for sex. Specifically, I heard that it made men less sensitive, allowing them to prolong the time before orgasm. This sounded good to me, so I bought some coke and started seeing lots of women, testing out what I’d heard. It didn’t make me superhuman in the longevity department, but it certainly did make my sexual experiences more intense.
After a while, the girls I hung out with were all using. It was a perfect environment for disaster. There were times when I’d be at some girl’s apartment and all I wanted to do was go back home, but I was too fucked up to move.
One time I went to an apartment on Fountain Avenue to buy cocaine. During the transaction, the gentleman I was buying it from reached under his desk and pulled out a .45-caliber handgun. He cocked it and laid it down on the desk. That was all he did. Maybe he was just trying to make sure I didn’t try anything funny. I kept my cool, made my purchase, and got the hell out of that apartment.
After he shut the door behind me, a door down the hall opened, and a girl poked her head out and said, “Hey, come here.”
I walked down to her and said, “Yes?”
“How much did you buy?” she said.
She obviously knew what the score was, so I didn’t play stupid. “Five grams,” I said.
She said, “I’ll give you a blow job for half a gram.” That happened to me more than once. Sometimes I’d go along, and sometimes not.
I remember another coke dealer who went by the street name of Madison. If a girl was around, sometimes Madison would pull out a pipe, take a hit, suck in a deep breath, and motion for the girl to come closer. He’d then blow the smoke into her mouth and give her a kiss. What a despicable thing I was involved in.
In my new environment, with my new friends, everywhere I went somebody had a gram or more. They’d put it in your hand, and each nostril w
ould get a shot. It would give you a rush, and then twenty minutes later—if it took that long—you were craving more. Cocaine, it turned out, was not addictive: it was very addictive.
If you wanted sex during the 1980s in Hollywood, you needed only one of two things: cocaine or money. If a girl was addicted she was probably going to need a couple of hundred bucks to pay the rent because her rent money had already gone up in smoke. All you had to do if you wanted to have sex with her was give her money or coke. If you went to a party and flashed a gram bottle, you knew you were flaunting a commodity that every girl at that party wanted. Guys I knew really well—actors, producers, writers—were all using cocaine as a way to compete for girls.
After I began freebasing, my life got even stranger. I’d wake up in a room I didn’t recognize, in a house I couldn’t remember going to. I probably remembered the girl, but she was already gone; maybe she had left me a note, or maybe not. If I was making a movie, I’d get myself together and go to the studio. How I made those pictures, I’ll never know, but I’m proud that I was able to manage it. When it came time to work, somehow I was able to dispel all my distractions and all my weaknesses.
To escape from myself on the weekends, I went to the only drug-free safe haven I knew: Hefner’s. At Hef’s I’d watch a movie, eat some dinner, and flirt with a beautiful woman.
Some friends and I even created our own little place where we could take drugs anytime we wanted to. A hairdresser to the stars owned a little place in LA called The Candy Store. It had a doorman, and to get in you had to say the password, which changed every couple of days. In front the place sold candy—Tootsie Rolls, lemon drops, stuff like that—and in back was a disco with a small dance floor. I was the president of the club, and I had the best time. And the worst.
Being an addict gives you a peculiar mixture of thoughts and feelings. On the one hand, your body is crying for relief. On the other, when you’re freebasing cocaine, you feel extraordinarily good. Your life becomes much more intense. The candle burns very brightly. Yet you can see the damaging effects the addiction is having on you. You know that what you’re doing isn’t good for you—you know that it’s killing you, really—but you don’t stop. I knew that my cocaine use was hurting my looks, which was my stock-in-trade as a leading man. When the face that looks back at you from the morning mirror is puffy and haggard you start thinking to yourself, Now I’m in serious trouble.
I wasn’t so addicted that I couldn’t make the few movies offered to me. My problem was that the movie offers were still few and far between, and now I needed all the money I could get—I had three ex-wives, six children, and a cocaine habit to support—so I was even less choosy about the work I did. And that was killing me. At times like this it wasn’t easy to remember that all I’d ever wanted to do was be in the movies.
In 1982 I worked in a movie called BrainWaves. Keir Dullea of 2001: A Space Odyssey played the husband of a comatose accident victim, and somehow I, the surgeon, had given the wife the brain of a murder victim. The movie, which was awful, took twelve days to shoot. I had a hard time during filming because I was using really heavily.
Othello, the Black Commando was next. I got the part of Iago because Tony Perkins, the actor they had hired to play the role, died. Max Boulois, the producer and actor who played Othello, called me up and said, “We’ll give you three hundred thousand dollars to come and do this movie.”
I said, “I’ll be there.” I got the money up front, but after paying me and covering other expenses, it turned out that Max didn’t have enough money left to make the picture. He said, “I’ll give you fifty percent of the picture if you give me back some money.”
I said, “I’m sorry. I can’t do that.” The movie was a bomb and so was my next film, Balboa, in which I played a scheming real estate tycoon. During the shooting of Balboa, I made the work bearable by chasing some of the beauties who played beach girls. My teenage son, Nicholas, stayed with me for part of the shooting of the picture. I was hitting on the girls and so was he. A chip off the old block.
Sonny Bono, a smart and funny man, appeared with me in the film. I liked Sonny very much. While I was living at the Keck estate, Sonny had come to me and asked if he and Cher could buy it. Since I didn’t own it, I couldn’t sell it. I could have exercised my right to buy it for three hundred thousand dollars and Sonny and Cher could have bought it from me, but Sonny thought that was too convoluted, so he passed.
I had worked with the two of them a little when I appeared on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour in the 1970s. I knew the couple had their problems. Cher was angry with Sonny, but Sonny loved her through it all.
Cher’s unhappiness stemmed from her desire not to be part of an act. She thought she could do better on her own, but for years she subjugated herself to the act for the sake of their marriage and their careers. She stayed with Sonny until she couldn’t stand it anymore. After they split, nobody expected Sonny to achieve anything, and at first it looked like they might be right. He did bad movies like Balboa until he gave acting up for politics. He became mayor of Palm Springs and later a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. I was glad for his success, knowing what a decent guy he was.
My next picture was Where Is Parsifal? The producer was Alexander Salkind, who also produced Superman. Peter Lawford and Orson Welles were my costars. The movie was a longer version of an hour-long television show about love, hate, and chasing women. Alex Sal kind was married to Berta Domínguez, who herself acted in the film. Berta was short, stocky, and older than Alex, who had to be in his sixties, and I was supposed to be her lover. Everyone was miscast in this film, including me. Of course, whatever Berta wanted, Berta got. She might stop shooting at two in the afternoon and have lunch or go see a girlfriend. When I saw her car coming back, I’d yell, “Here she comes,” and then we’d all go back to our places.
Orson Welles played Klingsor. In one scene I was supposed to talk to him while he sat in the backseat of a car, but Orson was so big that he couldn’t get out of the car. They had to have a special door made for him.
In one scene my character was having a conversation with Orson’s character. The director said “Action,” and I gave my line, and then the director yelled “Cut,” and asked me to do it again.
Without bothering to whisper, Orson said, “Tony, when you say it this time, change it. Make it a little funnier.”
I said, “You think so?”
He said, “You know what you want to say. Make it funnier.” So I did, and the director liked it better. Orson was right. Can you imagine getting direction from a genius like Orson Welles? For the rest of the film I inserted little pieces, interwove them in the dialogue, and it turned out fine. I enjoyed getting to know Orson off the set too. When he came to LA we’d have dinner at Spago, Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant. Orson would sit at the end table, where he was able to come and go as he pleased without anyone seeing him. He’d bring along a little dog that would bark at me.
“Orson,” I’d say, “he’s going to bite me.”
“Well, bite him back,” Orson said. “Fuck him.”
During the time I stayed in London making Parsifal, I spent a lot of time driving around at night looking for cocaine, descending into the depths of the city, looking for the drug I couldn’t live without.
When I returned to LA, I kept meeting girls who did cocaine, and I kept providing it to them. I lived aimlessly, using coke to numb myself to the sad state of my career. I was very lucky that Nicolas Roeg, a fine film director, asked me to play Senator Joseph McCarthy in the movie Insignificance in 1985. An actor by the name of Michael Emil played Albert Einstein, Theresa Russell played Marilyn Monroe, and Gary Busey played Joe DiMaggio. I liked my fellow actors a lot, and the script was wonderful. It was a good moment in a period that was otherwise memorable only for the depths of my despair. I was slowly killing myself, and I knew it. But I kept right on going.
My last film for what seemed like an eternity was Club Life, also known as
King of the City, a musical thriller about a bouncer, which was released in 1986. After that, I simply could not get a fucking movie job. I wasn’t offered anything for the longest time, which was a terrible blow to me. I missed the action, I missed the money, but the thing I missed the most was just making movies.
My career didn’t fall on hard times because of cocaine. Everyone was on coke. Maybe it was because, at the age of sixty, I was no longer a young man. That was when I began to see the sad truth about having devoted my life to my profession. I had given the movies everything I had ever since I was a kid, saving nickels and dimes from shining shoes so I could go see Tyrone Power at the Loews theater in the Bronx. Once I got to Hollywood, I gave it my all. I learned my lines; I did my own stunts; I tried to save the studio money. I could make movies quickly and easily. I could even make the actors around me better. But when an actor reaches a certain age, that’s it. The movie business is not a profession for old people, not if you’re in front of the camera.
By this time I began to see the value of having a backup plan for my acting career. I just wanted to hang around a set and be part of it. If I had planned ahead better, maybe I could have kept working as a makeup man or a screenwriter or a producer. But now it was too late for me to do anything about that. I was out in the cold, utterly miserable, and feeling hopeless. If my life didn’t turn around soon, I wasn’t going to have much left to turn around.
