American Prince (11 page)

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

S
oon 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 Kelly, 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.

I loved going out, but I didn’t have a lot of money to spend. After paying my rent and the installment on my membership in the Screen Actors Guild, I had about twenty-five bucks a week to live on, which was enough to get by but didn’t allow for any luxuries. I was netting roughly the same amount I had been receiving from the GI Bill of Rights when I was studying drama in New York City. Back then my dad would slip me a few bucks here and there, which helped, but I didn’t have his help here in Hollywood. Still, I loved being on my own. I just had to be frugal to make it work.

The important thing was that I had enough money to take girls out on dates now and then. There were so many beautiful women in Hollywood, and I was meeting more of them all the time. One girl I went out with had competed as Miss Sweden in the Miss Universe contest. She didn’t win, but as one of six finalists she was given a contract with Universal. She was a breathtaking natural beauty, a tall, eighteen-year-old blonde with a spectacular figure. Her name was Anita Ekberg.

The first time I picked up Anita to take her out, she threw her arms around me and we never got any further than her couch. At least she had a couch! I was fortunate enough to have a number of romantic moments with Anita, but we ran into the same problem I’d had with Marilyn Monroe: we were too young and too busy with our careers to make time for a serious relationship. Like Marilyn, Anita’s evenings were often taken up by big-shot film executives, and it was tough for me to compete with that. Anita ended up dating a string of movie stars, including Errol Flynn, Yul Brynner, and Frank Sinatra.

I went out with another actress, Betty Thatcher, who was also a knockout. I took her to a club in downtown LA owned by Benny Leonard, the Jewish prizefighter. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were working there weekends, doing their show. That’s when I met Jerry—and that’s when Jerry met Betty. It was obvious right away that he had big eyes for her. I had just met her, and we weren’t emotionally involved, so I stepped out of the way.

When I first met him, Jerry Lewis seemed very gregarious and open, just the way he was on stage. As I got to know him better, I saw another side to his personality. He could be very domineering, even mean, and sometimes acted like everybody worked for him. But at the same time, Jerry was absolutely hilarious to be around. He loved being outrageous. We’d be walking down the street together and he’d start skipping, just like a little kid. When we went out to eat, he’d stick his fingers in everybody else’s food. If you were driving a car with him in the passenger seat, he’d grab the wheel and force you onto the sidewalk. Jerry always had candy in his pocket, and if we were at a party, he would walk over to a girl, drop a piece of candy down her blouse, and go after it. I’m telling you, he was crazy, a helluva lot of fun, and completely impossible.

One day I was walking down a Universal Studios street when some guy stopped me and asked, “Can you dance?”

What, are you kidding me? Here I am, working to get my big break, so what am I going to say? “Of course,” I replied. “There’s nothing I can’t do.”

He smiled, and we made our introductions. He was Robert Siodmak, the director who had made
The Killers
with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. Now he was making a movie called
Criss Cross
for Universal. He said someone from casting would call me. I was excited, but by now I knew enough about Hollywood to take a wait-and-see attitude.

Later that afternoon a girl from the mail department knocked on my dressing room door and handed me a note:
Call Bob Palmer.
Bob Palmer was the head of casting. When I called he said, “The director of
Criss Cross
just called and wants you in his film. Burt Lancaster is in it, too. The director wants you to dance with Yvonne De Carlo. Can you really dance?”

“Sure I can dance,” I said.

“He’s expecting you first thing tomorrow,” Palmer replied.

Most fans know Yvonne De Carlo as the TV character Lily Munster from
The Munsters,
but in 1945 she played Salome in
Salome Where She Danced,
a role that made her a star. Two years later she played the lead in
Slave Girl,
and audiences could almost feel the heat from her sultry sensuality. When I met Yvonne, her career was soaring, and now she was starring in a picture with Burt Lancaster, who was also a big star.

The premise of
Criss Cross
was that Burt and Yvonne were in a relationship, but had been divorced and he had left town for a year. While he was away, she worked as a dancer and a prostitute, and in this one scene she was dancing with me. I was on the screen for about two minutes. I was supposed to do the rumba, whatever that was. I just shook my body like crazy, and everyone loved it. When Yvonne’s character and I are dancing, Burt walks in and sees us. She goes over to him, and I’m left standing there, but I decided not to let that bother me. I was going to dance, dammit, girl or no girl. So I kept on going. They liked that too.

I was very attracted to Yvonne, and she took a liking to me as well. We started going out, and after a few dates we went to bed. The excitement of slowly taking off Yvonne De Carlo’s clothes was indescribable. Having her undressed
with me
in a bed on Mulholland Drive overlooking LA was like winning first prize in the lottery. It was like a sweet, sexy Hollywood romance, only it was real.

The picture was released a few months later. My family still lived in New York, and I had told my mother all about the film, so all my relatives and friends were waiting for
Criss Cross
to come out. My parents reported that when I appeared on the big screen in my bit part, the theater in our neighborhood exploded with cheers and applause. And my friends and family weren’t the only ones who liked seeing me up on screen. Fans mailed in hundreds of letters asking:
Who was that guy who danced with Yvonne De Carlo?
The studio was so impressed by all that mail that it renewed my contract right away and bumped up my salary to a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. I’d been on screen exactly two minutes, but they turned out to be the most important two minutes of my life.

As soon as I started getting fan mail, I knew I was on the right track too. And when I watched myself in the picture, I liked the way I looked and moved on screen. I’d already been working hard at learning my craft, but now I poured everything I had into it. I paid close attention to every last detail. Now I was in a hurry to be a movie star. I didn’t want to have to wait until I was thirty; I
needed
it to happen
now.
I needed it to counteract all the negative stuff in my head that I had heard all my life from my mother, from relatives, and from people in the neighborhood.
You’re good for nuttin. You’re gonna end up a homosexual dancer in some lousy club. You’ll never make a living as an actor.

I didn’t deny any of this crap, because I didn’t want to dignify it with a response. Still, I could feel it all around me. I could feel it in my own family. But when I signed my contract with Universal, all of a sudden I could sense that things had changed. People from back home treated me a little differently. I was accorded a little more respect those days when I went home to visit. But I could see in some people’s eyes that they were thinking I must have been shacking up with some gay studio exec, that someone powerful must be promoting me in exchange for favors. And there were people working at Universal who probably felt the same way. I didn’t have any film experience. How else could I have gotten into a movie so quickly? I could hardly blame anyone for their cynicism when I was having difficulty believing things were going so well myself. So I played it cool and didn’t let on when I felt insulted. I never became angry, mean, or frustrated. Even in those first few months I knew that success would be the best revenge.

My parents were also having a hard time seeing me as a successful actor. It seemed so implausible. They’d been going to the movies their whole lives, and for them to go to the movies and see me up on that screen—it was a major thrill for them. They were so excited they didn’t even get upset when they saw my new name, Tony Curtis.

•                           •                           •

M
y next movie
,
City Across the River,
was about street gangs. Based on my fan mail for
Criss Cross,
the studio wanted me to have the lead role, but the director, Maxwell Shane, got cold feet and refused to give it to me. I suspect Shane didn’t take the chance because I had so little film experience: he had absolutely nothing to go on except one scene in
Criss Cross
when I was faking the rumba. I had some experience in the Yiddish theater, but no movie directors had seen me in those plays. Plenty of people like me got two minutes on screen in one film, and that was it; six months later their contract was allowed to expire, and they went back home. I didn’t want that to happen to me, which was why I wanted this lead so bad. But at least I got a supporting role that gave me some lines. I was making progress.

In
City Across the River
I played Mitch, one of the gang members. Peter Fernandez played the lead, and Stephen McNally was the star of the film. McNally was a good-looking man in his mid-thirties who was a very versatile actor. Steve was good enough to play nuanced parts but usually not quite good enough to get the lead. Looking back, I remember that he did a perfectly fine job, but there was no bite to his performance.

So I played Mitch, a lesser role, and Joshua Shelley, a comedian and a solid character actor, played Crazy, a gruff guy from the streets. In the movie I watched over Crazy, took care of him, and made sure he was all right. He fell in love with the girl lead, so when she started going out with Peter Fernandez, Crazy wanted to kill himself. I talked him out of it.