Ed here: With all the Tony Curtis pieces on the web you'd think there would be nothing left to say. But Esquire's Tom Junod's piece may be the most incisive.
Tom Junod:
He made quite an impression on me, Tony did. I still remember sitting in Spago with him and Jill, and what he said after Jill St. John came over to his table, with Robert Wagner, and made nice to him: "What a piece of shit." I still remember what he said about younger women, and fidelity to older ones: "Can you imagine Tony Curtis with a woman my age?" I still remember the story he told about Billy Wilder — about what Billy Wilder said to him after Tony's son OD'd and Tony stumbled one night back to Spago, nearly blind with guilt and grief and remorse, and wound up kneeling in front of Billy Wilder at his familiar table, asking, "Billy, how could this happen, how could my boy do such a thing?": "You, Tony. You showed him how." The Hollywood Tony lived in was that kind of place — a barbaric place, in which the cost of being as beautiful as Tony Curtis or Marilyn Monroe or even Jill St. John was putting your beauty in the hands of someone as merciless as Billy Wilder — and yet Tony survived it, because he never forgot that it was the beautiful ones who got laid, and never ceased delighting in the fact that he, Bernie Schwartz from the Bronx, got to fuck Marilyn Monroe.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/tony-curtis-death-093010?src=nl&mag=esq&list=nl_enl_cel_non_100410_tony-curtis&kw=ist#ixzz11WFcvphs
for the rest go here:
http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/tony-curtis-death-093010?src=nl&mag=esq&list=nl_enl_cel_non_100410_tony-curtis&kw=ist#ixzz11PfyAbKo
Junod's article seems to be mostly self-aggrandizing horsepucky. He saw what he wanted to see about Curtis, all of it negative, and this made him more believable to people who always look for the darkness.
ReplyDeleteAt times (if the article is correct) it must have been very difficult for him to play that part everyday.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link, Ed.
Junod's portrait of Curtis seems very congruent with Curtis' second autobiography, as revealed by the lowest rated reviews for the book on Amazon. Curtis comes across as a feckless horndog who cheated on all his wives and refused to take responsibility for any of his personal problems and failures.
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