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Sunday, November 24, 2002

By Barry Paris, Post-Gazette Film Critic

Tony Curtis: "You play the market?"

Marilyn Monroe: "No, the ukulele."

When production on "Some Like It Hot" began in 1958, producer David O. Selznick told director Billy Wilder, "You want machine guns and dead bodies and drag gags in the same picture? Forget it, Billy. You'll never make it work. "

Indeed, the idea of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag, with Marilyn Monroe singing and Wilder directing, would go down in the history books if -- and only if -- it worked.

	Tony Curtis in drag for the film "Some Like it Hot." "Some Like It Hot" Where: Heinz Hall, Downtown. When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 1 and 6:30 p.m. next Sunday. Tickets: $44.50-$59.50; 412-392-4900.

People likewise doubted the now-touring stage version featuring an American icon originally named Bernie Schwartz, better known as Tony Curtis -- one and the same.

"Some Like It Hot," the film, opens with Curtis playing sax in a speakeasy band, Lemmon on bass. Soon enough, they lose their jobs, accidentally witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and hightail it out of town (one step ahead of gangster Spats Colombo) on a train to Florida, disguised as Josephine and Daphne for their new gig in an all-girl band. The band's real-girl singer is Sugar Kane (nee Sugar Kowalchik) -- the dazzling Monroe.

Once ensconced in Miami, Lemmon is hotly pursued by horny millionaire Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown). Curtis pursues Monroe, but it's hard to do so in drag. That prompts his yachting outfit and impersonation of Cary Grant as the phony Shell heir, who gets the title line: "I guess some like it hot, but I prefer classical music myself."

Forty-four years later, transposed to the stage in 2002 (and with a Pittsburgh run to commence Tuesday at Heinz Hall), Curtis is singing and dancing -- but not in drag. He plays the Brown role of Osgood, instead. And he plays it very differently.

"The part was somewhat abbreviated, not quite what I hoped it would be," says Curtis of the stage script. "I was misled by the original producers. But we worked it out. I wouldn't even try to do what Joe E. Brown did. He had his own mechanism, his own sense of who he was, and Billy Wilder wanted it just that way for him.

"Joe's Osgood was an eccentric billionaire. My Osgood is a handsome eccentric billionaire -- with all the girlies around me. That's a part I've researched all my life!"

From screen to stage

So how do the roar of the greasepaint and smell of the crowd compare with filmmaking? Does it get his adrenaline going?

"I find myself in a kind of 'public solitude,' where I'm completely centered on what I'm doing, immersed in that scene, working on those moments, finding some unusual way to enlarge it, embellish it, make it work for theater. You do that in movies, too, but it's dismembered. You put it in but you don't see it until long after.

"In movies, you don't wait for laughter. In the theater, I don't wait for laughs, either. I just attack my material, and if the laugh is powerful, then I wait a beat. But you're right, the adrenaline of that live audience kicks you into another level of consciousness."

In the film "Some Like It Hot," Curtis did three characters under the cover of one: Joe, the musician -- vain, shallow, interested only in going from job to job. Josephine, his female front -- aloof, arrogant, frightened of men. And a male front in the form of that bored, indolent millionaire, who happens to talk like Cary Grant.

"The men's stuff was easy," Curtis recalls. "It was the ladies' stuff that had me worried. Billy brought in a female impersonator to work with Jack and me and teach us things like how to hold our hands. If we held them up, our muscles showed. If we held them palm down, the muscles disappeared. When we walked in heels, we threw our weight forward and our bottoms under. We had our legs and chests shaved, eyebrows plucked, hips padded. To find the appropriate bra was no easy matter. I'm a 36D myself."

Orry-Kelly, the film's costume designer, was "a very gay guy in all senses of the word, and he told me that one day when he was fitting Marilyn he said, 'You know, Tony's ass is better-looking than yours.' And Marilyn said, 'Oh, yeah? Well he doesn't have [breasts] like these!' -- and then yanked open her blouse to prove it."

To determine whether their feminine makeover was convincing, Lemmon suggested they make an empirical test, as Curtis recalls:

"So we marched down past the commissary into the ladies room and went to the mirrors. There were a couple of women standing around. I took out my lipstick and started putting it on. The girls would come out of the stalls, come up behind us, fix their makeup, wash their hands -- not one of them gave us a second look."

Lemmon opined, many years later, that "Tony was much more successful at the imitation. I was clumsy, I was a jerk, the shoes were killing me, my ankles were turning. But Tony could carry it off with a great aloofness; he just put his head up in the air and pouted his lips. His Josephine was fearless about it, but my Daphne was scared [silly]."

Behind the scenes

"Some Like It Hot" grew out of a 1932 German film, "Fanfaren der Liebe" ("Fanfare of Love"), in which two unemployed musicians don various disguises to scam their way into jobs. They blacken their faces to play with black bands, wear earrings to work as gypsies, dress up as girls to play in a women's combo. The Wilder version, brilliantly co-written with I.A.L. Diamond, was set in 1929 Chicago and did away with all but the female disguises.

In 1958, Monroe was in a state of depression after a miscarriage. By one account, she took the Sugar part because her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, needed money to pay his legal bills stemming from the House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunt. Monroe looked and acted nervous throughout the whole production. Curtis says that after each scene, she called out "Coffee!" and was brought a thermos containing straight vermouth.

"Some Like It Hot" came in at a total cost of $2.8 million, unusually expensive for a comedy in 1958. But it earned back $15 million and made history -- as did Curtis' reply to a reporter who asked what it was like making love to Monroe: "It was like kissing Hitler."

Wilder elaborated in a 1992 interview with this writer: "I never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe, nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo. She paid absolutely no attention to anybody. She never thought, 'We're doing 80 takes, and these guys are standing here, cramping, they're not going to get any better -- in fact, it may kind of curdle on us.' That's what Tony meant when he said it was like kissing Hitler."

Lemmon summed it up with the following example:

"In one scene, she knocks at the door, Tony and I throw our wigs on real quick, she comes in and says, 'Where is that bourbon?' She sees it lying in an open drawer. 'Oh, there it is.' And she picks it up. That's it -- eight words. But she could not get them out. She kept stopping and stopping. Billy was going bananas. I never saw a director come up with so many different ways to say how to play it, after each take.

"Tony and I are just standing there, our legs are getting tired because of the damned high heels, so we made a bet. I said, 'What do you think it's gonna go to?' He says, 'Fifty.' I say, 'Ten bucks she does it in 40.' I forget who won the $10, but it got up to take 48."

Wilder got into a bitter dispute with Miller ("We were in midflight, and there was a nut on the plane"). His public criticism of Monroe sparked the famous telegram war, in which Miller blamed Wilder for a second miscarriage his wife suffered just 12 hours after the final shooting day. The back-and-forth volleys included this one from Wilder:

"Had you, dear Arthur, been not her husband but her writer and director, and been subjected to all the indignities I was, you would have thrown her out on her can, thermos bottle and all, to avoid a nervous breakdown. I did the braver thing. I had a nervous breakdown."

Wilder later apologized, and Monroe was encouraged to do the same. But when she finally brought herself to phone Wilder, his wife Audrey answered and said he was out.

"Well, when you see him, will you give him a message from me?" Monroe asked. "Please tell him to go [expletive] himself." Pause. "And my warmest personal regards to you, Audrey."

After "Some Like It Hot," Monroe made one more film, "The Misfits" (1961). Her final attempt was "Something's Got to Give" (1962) for Fox, during which she was absent 21 of the 33 shooting days. She was fired and died a few days later on Aug. 5, 1962.

'Busy as I can be'

For Curtis, 77, one of the pleasant differences between doing the stage version of "Some Like It Hot," which also star's Pittsburgh's own Lenora Nemitz as bandleader Sweet Sue, is the absence of a need for a catheter:

"I have time to do all of my duties before and after, and I don't have to worry about our darling Marilyn showing up. We were always waiting for her -- in drag. We had to wear these horrible steel jockstraps, and one big problem was what to do when you had to pee. So I rigged up this funnel-and-hose thing. It was uncomfortable, but it did the trick, and I always had that little 'pipe to relief.' I should have patented it. It ranged around my thigh and abdomen, down the inside of one leg, then hid behind the silk stocking I was wearing, so that I could unroll it, take care of business, and roll it up again without ever standing up or sitting down.

"People said, 'That Tony -- how does he do it? Strapped all day long in those women's clothes, never whimpers, never has to go the bathroom!' Jack didn't have this device. Once he sort of caught me and said, 'What the hell are you doing?' I said, 'Never mind.' I never shared it with him because he was too conservative. He would never have gone for it."

Nowadays, Curtis says he is "painting all the time, making my assemblages and boxes, as busy as I can be. Sweet Jilly is with me all the time, and we're having a glorious experience touring."

Sweet Jilly is Jill Vandenberg, the beautiful, statuesque blonde who supports and delights him in a way none of his four previous wives ever did. You can tell by the tone of his voice that she -- and this stage musical -- are making up for some of the disappointments in Curtis' life.

Lemmon got an Oscar nomination for best actor in "Some Like It Hot." Curtis was overlooked, though his performance was in fact the subtler and better of the two. Wilder lost out for best director and screenplay. The only one of the film's six nominees to win in '59 was Orry-Kelly for costumes. "Ben-Hur" swept the field.

Unlike the much-loved Lemmon, who died last year, and Wilder, who died just eight months ago, Curtis was never properly recognized by Hollywood, in general, and the Academy in particular. The Academy couldn't get out of its rut of considering him just a light comedy pretty-boy and leading man.

In fact, Curtis could and did do it all. Anyone who still doubts his abilities as a serious and versatile dramatic actor has never seen his amazing performances in "The Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) and "The Boston Strangler" (1968), above and beyond "Some Like It Hot" -- consistently voted, in every audience and critics' poll, the greatest film comedy of all time.

But it's time now, in Pittsburgh, to check out the stage version -- and the ongoing legend, star survivor and rebel-without-a-pause who graces it.

Barry Paris co-wrote "Tony Curtis: The Autobiography" (1993), from which portions of this story were excerpted, courtesy of William Morrow & Co. Paris can be reached at 412-263-3859.