Archive Digger

In memory of the great late Tony Curtis I went for a dig in the archives to pull together a brief history of the Hollywood legend.

Born Bernard Schwartz, he grew up the son of a tailor, a scrappy New York City Jewish street kid determined to be somebody. After a stint in the Navy, he got his first show business job in Chicago in 1946 with a Yiddish theater located at Ogden and Kedzie avenues.

—Chicago Tribune, “Tony Curtis Still Likes It Hot” 1-28-2003

Of the experience, he told the Tribune:

“The man who ran the theater thought, with my name, I’d be a natural,” he recalls. “But I couldn’t speak a word of Yiddish. I had to learn all my lines phonetically. So he changed my name to Bernie White because he said the neighborhood audience would think Schwartz was a made-up name for a kid who was really Italian masquerading as a Jew.”

Here, Curtis explains his “racier” film choices, that set him apart from his fellow idols:

Unlike some pretty boys of the era, including Hudson and Wagner, Curtis had a career that includes some of the more tantalizing, socially provocative movies of the studio system, made by now legendary directors. “I wasn’t satisfied playing conventional leading men,” he says. “Whatever gods gave me this good fortune, I was determined not to [toss] it away.”

Taking his role in “Some Like It Hot” was risky on multiple levels:

When “Some Like It Hot” (1959) came up, Curtis was eager. “I always wanted to be a forerunner, I always watched out for sensitive areas. It was dangerous to dress up as a woman then, particularly since magazines like Confidential were printing rumors that I was gay myself.”

In this LA Times Q&A Curtis divulges even more from the Golden Days of Hollywood—“Tony Curtis: Still Young (and Ornery) at Heart”

On arriving in Hollywood in 1948:

It was fabulous. It was an overwhelming experience. I was a handsome boy. It helped. How I got into movies is key to the environment we are sitting in now—the way I am. I didn’t have to kiss anybody. I didn’t have to kiss anything. I just got off the streets of New York and when the war was over, they gave me the GI Bill, so I didn’t have to go to work right away. Someone saw me in the play “Golden Boy” [in New York] and the next thing, I am under contract to Universal. I was 22 years old. I started doing good, and suddenly I was King Kong at Universal for seven or eight years.

Curtis was also a painter, albeit a self-deprecating one. This is from the Sun Sentinel:

Bryant Gumbel said to me on the Today show — `How do you feel about that?` I said, `Well, they just sold a van Gogh for $39 million. So mine ain`t such a big deal. When you compare the two, that`s not even the shipping costs.’

This 2009 LA Time’s article includes a Tony Curtis quote that seems a fitting tribute to the “ornery” and loquacious Hollywood icon:

“I’m just a lucky guy,” said Curtis over the phone from his home in Las Vegas. “I am having such a wonderful life.”