Heavily invested self-interest
Tom Shone TONY CURTIS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Tony Curtis and Barry Paris Heinemann, f16.99, pp. 352 In a rare stab at film criticism, the man- aging director of the National Association of Underwear and Allied Products once wrote to Universal Studios to lodge a com- plaint about Tony Curtis. About what exactly? His lousy Roman accent in Son of Ali Baba (`Yondah lies the castle of my Faddah')? His famous blasphemy that kiss- ing Monroe was like kissing Hitler? No, I'm afraid it was altogether more serious than that.
I think you will agree [he wrote] that it is the consensus of opinion among civilised people that the wearing of clothing not only serves
to set mankind apart from the beasts of the field but also promotes comfort, cleanliness and health.
The threat to this holy trinity?
The failure of Tony Curtis to wear an under- shirt in a number of scenes in Forty Pounds of Trouble.
As threats to world civilisation go, Tony Curtis's missing underwear may not be up there with Hitler — and certainly not up there with the suggestion that he smooched better than Monroe — but that letter was on to something. Auteur theory certainly has its advantages when it comes to boiling movies down to their essentials, but what about their inessentials? What about Underwear and Allied Products? Errol Flynn's Dernier no 7s? Cary Grant's pyjamas?
Curtis straddled two eras of movie machismo, each with their own dress code: on the one hand, swashbucklers like Flynn, for whom a new role was nothing more than a change of costume; and, on the other, method maestros like Brando and Dean, kitted out in regulation white T- shirts for most of the time, but making up for it with as many emotional makeovers as could reasonably be crammed into a single scene. For his part, Curtis never had much time for the method. 'Just jerking off in Macy's window,' he writes here, 'all in the brain' — which isn't the sort of place he
likes to hang out all that much. When he arrived in Hollywood — a 'wiry and erratic and paranoid' New York Jew — Curtis had a lot to get off his chest, sure, but it was mostly just his shirts; not since Valentino was a male abdomen as repeatedly exposed in the cinema as Curtis's. Hollywood knew that it had got its hands on the new king of the milkshake set, and Curtis was more than happy to keep up his end of the bar- gain, having his jackets fitted with detach- able sleeves so that the screaming bobby-soxers, failing to go home with Cur- tis, could at least retreat arm-in-arm with his jacket. The films weren't much more sophisticated contraptions: fencing pics, boxing pics, Viking pics, trapeze pics anything to extract those 40 pounds of flesh.
On at least one occasion — the bath scene with Olivier in Spartacus — Curtis's chest-baring gave rise to a hint of homo- sexuality, but those of you still harbouring suspicions should read this book. I thought the sperm count of Clive James's memoirs was high; this one is so red-blooded it should seriously think of giving donations. With 'one or two exceptions', Curtis slept with so many of his leading ladies he thought it was written into his contract. Mae West was one such exception (by the time he acted with her in 1978, he was timing his on-set arrival by her morning enema insertions), as was Monroe (he was too busy taking bets with Lemmon on how many takes it would require her to say, 'Where is that bourbon?' Lemmon won: 48). His three successive wives simply had to make do with whatever they could get at the time, which one hopes is slightly better than they get here; Janet Leigh aside, they get sweet little pet-names like 'whoever it was at the time'. If that sounds vague, Curtis makes up for it with regular, and quite surprising, flashes of candour, writing in great detail, for instance, of his running battle with premature ejaculation — 'a lot of my early sexual experiences happened inside my trousers'. Despite what the managing director of the National Associa- tion of Underwear and Allied Products thought, maybe it wasn't such a bad idea that Curtis kept his underwear under wraps after all.
If he had a hard time forming attach- ments with women, Curtis had a better time male-bonding, if only because in Hollywood reciprocal plugs come with a clear set of instructions. Curtis's tributes to other actors and directors are followed with almost comic speed by the real reason for his good-will — they once paid Curtis a compliment. Of Gregory Peck we read, 'He was such a nice man, and still is', and then, just a few paragraphs down, that Peck once telephoned Curtis 'to say how much he'd liked working with me'. Sometimes only a full-stop separates the mutual appreciation (of Orson Welles, Curtis writes, 'He and I were very good friends. He once told an associate that he thought I was the finest American screen actor'), and in one price- less passage, barely a comma comes between Curtis and shame: Kubrick, we read, was 'a really fine man, liked me very much' — a syntactical compression which must set some sort of world record in the Showbiz Backslap Relay.
This, as you may have gathered, is a fan- tastically egotistical book, and all the more winning for it. Curtis is a great anecdotal- ist, and there's an engagingly Hefneresque swagger to his f—'em tone, to his unabashed pride in his choice of number plate for one of his Rollses (`TC1'), his choice of name for his third daughter (Alexandra Theodora Dido Curtis: 'what a great name'), and to his intense vanity about his looks (vowing, after crashing his Harley-Davidson, 'never to get on that f—er again'). Reading this book, you can perfectly understand why his best role was the one which gave his instinct for self-preservation a long enough leash to let this bull terrier of an ego free rein — Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success.
It wasn't the only thing Curtis got a nose- ful of; the last chapters deal with his coke addiction, which nearly brought his career to a stand-still, and, says Curtis, 'released my brain into some abstract thinking', which sounds just awful, although it per- haps explains the poems which he reprints here — cold turkeys, every one. Thankful- ly, he quit the habit, and his prose emerged, alive and kicking, to produce this book, a minor classic of spirited self- adoration.
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