American Prince (32 page)

As part of the clinic’s twelve-step recovery program, I wrote a letter to my boys, Nicholas and Benjamin. They were in their teens. I said, “I know I haven’t been a good father to you, but I promise to do better from now on. I’m not going to give up. You two guys are so important to me that I will do whatever it takes.”

I also wrote a letter to Penny. I told her that I knew about her infidelities, and that I was angry at her for keeping the boys from me. I told her I felt she was stealing them from me, and I didn’t like it. The letter didn’t change anything between us, but at least it gave me a chance to express myself in an honest way, which was something I hadn’t made a habit of doing before.

I wasn’t sure if the program at Betty Ford was going to work, but it did. When I checked out of the clinic, my cocaine use came to an end. I had a new life in front of me, one without cocaine, and hopefully with more of my children in it. There wasn’t too much I could do about my career, which was still in the toilet, so to help with my transition from movie star to private citizen, I devoted more and more time to painting.

Maybe I’ll Live Forever

A
s the time
between movies got longer and longer, I began painting more and more. I did a lot of sketching and painting in acrylics. My paintings were mostly abstract and surrealist, expressions of my fantasies, thoughts, and ideas. One of my paintings depicted a landscape, and in the middle of the landscape sat a table with a bottle of wine, some grapes, and an open book. Below the table was a wooden floor, despite the fact that the scene was outdoors. I wanted to jolt the viewer by showing how the ordinary and the surreal live side by side.

I didn’t have a painting teacher, but I was influenced greatly by the artists I met, especially Marc Chagall, whom I had the honor of actually meeting when I was filming
The Great Race.
We were in Paris, working on the end of the picture, when he came onto the set to watch us filming. Chagall projected an unmistakable aura of power and confidence.

In the mid-1980s I met an art dealer, Bill Mett, who had a gallery in Honolulu. He liked my paintings, so he invited me to come and paint at his gallery. I took him up on it. With my movie career fading into the sunset, I was determined to make it as an artist. I rented a house from Bill, and I liked Hawaii so much that I bought a house there and lived in it for two years.

I don’t remember a whole lot about the movies I made toward the end of my career. In 1986 I made a television movie called
Mafia Princess.
Susan Lucci, famous for her role as Erica in the soap opera
All My Children,
played Sam Giancana’s daughter, and I played Sam Giancana himself, the mafia kingpin whom Frank Sinatra had introduced me to. I didn’t make another movie for three years. Then I met a producer named Norman Vane. Norm wanted to make a horror film called
Midnight
that he had written and was going to direct, and he wanted to know if I’d star in it. With all that child support I had to pay, it was easy for me to say yes.

Midnight
was a good film, and the work went quickly and smoothly. I followed it with a comedy called
Lobster Man from Mars,
in which I played a movie producer who owed the IRS a lot of money. As in Mel Brooks’s
The Producers,
my character—the movie producer—had hit on the idea of deliberately making a bomb of a movie so he could take the production expenses as a massive tax write-off. When the movie came out, people loved it, and I got a lot of fan mail.

I didn’t make another movie until 1991, some five years later, when I made
Prime Target
in Canada. In this movie I was cast as a mob informant. Not long after, I made another forgettable movie called
Center of the Web,
in which an acting coach is wrongly accused of being a hit man, so he is forced to go undercover as a federal agent.

In 1992 I made a television movie called
Christmas in Connecticut,
directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. He and I had the best time working together. Of course we got along; we shared the first half of his last name. One time, just before I entered one of my shots, Arnold happened to be standing right next to me. As I got my cue he said, “Take no prisoners” and shoved me onto the set. It turned out to be a brilliant bit of direction. He was a charming, wonderful man, and we’ve remained good friends to this day.

It was around this time that I got some terrible news. You’ll recall that many years earlier my parents and I agreed to put my brother Bobby in a state mental facility. Bobby was twenty-eight at the time, and my parents could no longer take care of him. They had wanted me to take him into my home, but that was impossible. He was as impulsive as a five-year-old, but he had the body of an adult man. One time when he was at my house, he became agitated and started throwing punches at me. I was mostly able to block his swings until he calmed down. But Bobby was a person who needed twenty-four-hour supervision.

After Bobby moved into the state mental facility at Camarillo, I would go visit him every so often. One time Bobby asked me to take a stroll with him. We walked by a large crib that had a young woman in it, and as I passed she beckoned to me. She scared me, so I ignored her and kept following my brother, until he stopped abruptly. There was another patient standing there, looking at us. Bobby pointed at the man and said, “This guy is going to kill me.”

The man came over to us and said to me, “Where have I seen you?”

I said, “In the movies.”

He said, “You’re right. That’s where I saw you.”

Not far away stood a tiny woman wearing a floor-length housedress. Her gray hair was pulled back in a ponytail. The guy who had talked to me went over to her and said, “That’s Tony Curtis.”

She looked up and stared at me. “Who’s Tony Curtis?” she asked, vacantly. It was one of the few times in my life when I didn’t mind not being recognized. I just shook her hand and said, “I’m Bobby’s brother.”

As the years went by, Bobby’s condition worsened, and it was terrible to see. The visits became more and more difficult for me, until finally I just couldn’t handle going at all. Bobby didn’t seem to know who I was anyway. On August 22, 1992, my brother was found dead on the street in LA. He had left the hospital and refused to go back, so he had ended up living the life of a homeless panhandler. Someone had beaten him to death. My brother. I wept for him, and for the relationship we never really had.

I
n 1993
I went to Israel to make
The Mummy Lives.
I played the mummy, who bumps off a slew of people. That same year I made a first-rate picture called
Naked in New York.
Martin Scorsese produced it, and Whoopi Goldberg and Kathleen Turner starred, along with Timothy Dalton, Eric Stoltz, and Ralph Macchio. It was a story about a guy who wrote a play and wanted to get it produced. He and his partner come to me, an off-Broadway producer, and I help them put on their play. Unfortunately, it flops, and at the end of the picture I say to the writer, “Don’t take it to heart. You got the play produced. You’ll get another chance. And another. And when a play is successful, you’ll be successful. Me, I’m just a figment of your imagination. I’m just something early in your career.” Then I walk away and leave him standing there.

O
n the last
day of February 1993, I married for the fourth time. I wasn’t expecting it, and I wasn’t looking for it, but even though I was in my late sixties I still was capable of falling head over heels for a stunningly beautiful woman. I was attending a dinner at the Friar’s Club when I looked over at the next table and saw a young woman whose plunging neckline revealed quite a bit of the most beautiful, inviting breasts I had ever seen—and that was saying a lot. She was a tiny girl, not more than five foot two, but she was so sexy that I couldn’t help staring at her for the rest of the evening, imagining what it would be like to make love to her. I don’t know what it is about breasts that revs me up. Maybe I didn’t get enough breastfeeding when I was a baby. But whenever I feel an attraction like that, I put my charm into overdrive and see if I can make something good happen.

I got up from my seat and went over to the people who organized the event to find out what I could about this stunning woman. She turned out to be a Jewish attorney named Lisa Deutsch. I was sixty-seven, and she was thirty-three, but in my mind’s eye I was still a youngster. I’m fortunate enough to feel that way now, and as of this writing I’m eighty-three. When you get to a certain stage in life, women your own age seem ancient. Of course, they’re no more ancient than you are, but they don’t match up with the way you feel. I know it sounds crazy, but I refuse to give up that part of me that is still in tune with my youth—that part of me that still wants to steam up the windows in a car by making out. Why should I give that up if I don’t have to?

My romance with Lisa was a whirlwind. I met her parents and discovered that her father had suffered from anti-Semitism, so he was happy that his daughter was going out with a Jew. As for me, I had never been in a serious relationship with a Jewish girl before, so it made me a little nervous. I found out that one difference between shiksas and Jewish girls was that Jewish girls are very attached to their families. I made an effort to open myself up to Lisa’s parents, but it didn’t come naturally to me.

I was probably too quick to jump into this marriage, but I had always been impulsive when it came to affairs of the heart. Very quickly, though, I sensed the potential for trouble. Lisa’s father, who was a lawyer, wanted me to sign a prenuptial agreement in which I agreed to give Lisa half of everything I earned. That didn’t happen, but we got married anyway.

One time early in our marriage, Lisa and I went to a party where Ronald and Nancy Reagan were in attendance. Lew Wasserman and his wife were there, as were a number of famous actors, some of whom I’d adored in the movies when I was a kid. I was very pleased to be at the same party with them, socializing with them; it meant a lot to me. But when I introduced Lisa to them, she wasn’t at all impressed. At the time I didn’t understand why, but in retrospect I realized that she hadn’t grown up with their movies. She didn’t know anything about these actors, so being in their presence didn’t mean much to her. This was my first realization that the age difference was probably going to be a source of trouble. You might think I would have learned that lesson by now, but there she was, with that great inviting smile and that fantastic body, and she was my wife! How could life be better than this?

Our marriage lasted less than two years. Lisa seemed haunted by something in her past. I don’t know what it was, and she never encouraged any conversation about it. Professionally, Lisa devoted herself to legal work on behalf of clients who couldn’t afford legal services. I could tell that she was under a lot of stress, but I chalked that up to the demands of her job. I knew there was nothing I could do about that, and Lisa wasn’t an easy person to talk to about feelings—not that I was any prize in that category, either. Sadly, it wasn’t long before I could see she didn’t care about being with me, much less care about being married to me. I had done it again—given my heart to a woman on the basis of how she looked as opposed to who she was on the inside—and I braced myself for the inevitable: marriage number four was about to crash and burn.

Not long before we split up, I took Lisa to Paris as part of the publicity tour for my first book,
Tony Curtis: The Autobiography,
and we had some crazy fun on the roof of our hotel. It was a very romantic evening, but it turned out to be the last one we would ever enjoy. After we returned to LA, Lisa came home late one night. She was drunk, so I said, “Get out of here until you sober up.” She went downstairs to her bedroom and fell asleep. As I watched her walk away, I knew the marriage was over. After that she spent every night out. Our life together had turned to ashes.

When the marriage ended, I was surprised by the way I felt. I had expected to fall into a depression, but instead I was overcome by a sense of relief. There were no recriminations. I had had a good time while it lasted, and that was the end of that. I wasn’t crushed the way I had been with Christine and Penny. I just moved on.

When I got back from the book tour, I wasn’t feeling right. I was working out at Gold’s Gym in LA, part of my regular routine when I was in town, when I felt so dizzy and weak that I had to lie down. I called my doctor, who told me to come into his office right away. He and another doctor examined me, and they both decided I’d had a heart attack. They rushed me to the hospital, and two days later I was wheeled into the operating room for open-heart surgery. The surgeons took a vein out of my leg and used it to replace a blocked portion of a vein leading to my heart. Fortunately, I was able to recover quickly and completely, which stunned the doctors. They said it was because I’d been an athlete all my life.

My heart attack reminded me of a Yiddish joke: A great Jewish actor puts on the finest performance of
Hamlet
you’ll ever see in your life. At the end of the play, he dies. A lady from the audience gets up and shouts, “Give him an enema!”

The announcer says, “An enema? It wouldn’t help.”

The lady says, “An enema wouldn’t
hurt
!”

I
came through
my open-heart surgery just fine, but that hard ship was about to pale by comparison to a tragedy that is every parent’s worst nightmare. In July 1994, my son Nicholas, who had been living in a garage apartment at his mother’s house on Cape Cod, died of a drug overdose. He was twenty-three. I was so distraught I sank into a depression unlike anything I’d ever known. I just wanted to bring the final curtain down.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was somehow responsible for Nicholas’s death. Why did Nicholas get into drugs in the first place? Was he doing drugs because I’d done them? Was he doing drugs because he had a void where his father should have been? We got along well, so I didn’t think that was it. Did he inherit from me a tendency for substance abuse? I tormented myself with these thoughts, although I knew from my own experience that ultimately addiction is an individual madness. Nicholas was addicted, but his brother, Benjamin, wasn’t.