American Prince (18 page)

I said to myself,
How the hell did he get there so quickly?
What I didn’t realize was that Cole couldn’t walk; both his legs had been broken in a horseback-riding accident. After the rest of us left him on the couch, two assistants had picked him up and hurried him through a back hallway and into the dining room before we could get there. I had always equated physical prowess with force of personality, but here was a guy who couldn’t walk yet still dominated a room with his presence. Cole forced me to reconsider some of my basic assumptions. He was a remarkable man.

We all sat down and began the meal. I was sitting next to Janet, and I didn’t know which fork to use, whether to use the big spoon or the little spoon for soup, that sort of thing. My lack of sophistication bothered Janet, always the perfectionist. She began poking me and whispering to me, making sure I didn’t embarrass her with my inadequate manners. Her nagging pissed me off so much that I deliberately used the wrong knives and forks, which was childish but effective.

As we were sitting there, Ethel Merman picked up one of the wineglasses and gently squeezed it at the top. The wineglass was so delicate, and her touch so assured, that she could change its shape from round to oval without breaking it. I picked up my glass to inspect it, and Ethel said to me, “Go on. Try it.”

I squeezed, and this beautiful, delicate wineglass shattered in my hand. Ethel, who was dear and kind, said, “Don’t worry, kid, it could happen to any of us,” and then she took her own glass and shattered it just to make me feel better. I looked over at Cole, and he was laughing, but Janet was furious.

One time after the wineglass incident, I went to La Grenouille, a famous French restaurant in New York, with my friend Gene Shacove and the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, who was staying at the same hotel I was, the Sherry-Netherland. I told them what had happened at Cole Porter’s house. Gene tried it with his glass and shattered it. Dalí wasn’t sure what we were doing, but he stood up in the restaurant, turned his glass upside down, and poured the wine onto his dinner; if we were somehow pushing the boundaries, Dalí wasn’t going to let us do it alone.

There was so much about polite society that I just didn’t know. One time Janet and I were invited to go to the racetrack to see the quarterhorses run. I had never been to a racetrack, so I wasn’t sure what to wear. Janet said, “Just wear whatever you want.” I decided to wear jeans, but when I got there the other men were all looking snazzy in their sweaters and trousers, two-toned shoes, and felt hats. I wish I could tell you it didn’t matter to me, but the truth is that it made me feel inadequate. Those childhood wounds ran deep.

Janet’s obvious discomfort with my manners and my New York accent didn’t do much for my insecurity. She wanted to change me into Laurence Olivier, whose charm and polish were legendary. That was never going to happen. I was always going to stand out in a crowd, for better or for worse. And as time went on I got a stronger and stronger feeling that Janet thought it was for worse.

Janet and I had been nuts about each other when we first started going out. We loved the sex, and we loved the companionship; but it wasn’t long before the differences between us that had seemed so exciting at first started to create friction. In many ways, I was the naive one in the relationship. I had never been married before, but for Janet I was husband number three—and she had been only twenty-three years old! She had already lived a lot in that time, and she had developed very firm ideas about how everything should be. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before she started trying to change me to conform to those ideas.

From my point of view Janet was bossing me around, just as my mother had bossed my father around. I could see signs in myself that I was becoming subservient, which only made my flashbacks to childhood more intense. Janet and I would go to a party together, and if I lit my cigarette without offering to light the cigarette of the person I was talking to, Janet would poke me with her elbow. She would always wait for me to introduce her to my friends, but I rarely did, because I never knew who she knew and who she didn’t. This upset her every time.

She also had difficulty dealing with the attention that came with fame, whereas I enjoyed it. One time a studio hired a car to take us to a movie premiere at the Egyptian Theater in LA. When I got out of the car at the theater, screams erupted from the fans standing in the street. I reached into the car to help Janet out, and then we walked up to the entrance to the theater. On either side ropes kept the fans and the photographers from getting too close. The cameras were flashing, so I stopped to allow the photographers to take their shots. All the while, Janet was pulling on my arm to get me to go on in. Then she gave me a shove, and when I still didn’t move, she pinched me in the back.

I turned around and looked at her. With her teeth clenched she said, “Don’t stop and leave me out here like this. Get in there.” I looked her in the eye. She was furious.

When we got home that night, I decided to ask her about the incident. She said, “Don’t ever do that again. How dare you embarrass me in front of all those people? You made me look like a fool. How dare you treat me like that?”

When I look back on all the challenges we faced, what amazes me is not that Hollywood marriages fail at such an overwhelming rate; it’s that any survive at all.

Getting the Girls to Scream

I
had a lot
of good moments in my next movie,
Six Bridges to Cross,
a film about the Brinks armored car robbery in Boston. I played the ringleader who dies at the end of the movie. We went to Boston to film the exterior shots and shot the interiors at the Universal studio in LA. Sal Mineo played me as a kid.

Sal, who was born in the Bronx, was a gifted actor who had started out at Warner Bros. playing with James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause.
Sal and I ended up being good friends. He was a good guy, and you could see he loved working in movies; like me, he felt privileged to get those jobs. But sadly, as he got older he soured because he was slight and boyish, so he always got the part of “the kid,” but he wanted bigger roles. The movie that made him a star was
Exodus,
a picture made by a big studio, United Artists, with a handsome budget. They weren’t trying to save money by hurrying the production, so Sal was able to develop his performance. In my Universal pictures, by contrast, the studio didn’t want character as much as it wanted action, romance, or adventure. Sal suffered a tragic end when he was stabbed to death in West Hollywood by a mugger who didn’t even know who Sal was.

A
ll this time
my mother had never stopped harping at me to get my brother Robert into the movies. When I mentioned to her that an actor was going to play me as a boy in
Six Bridges to Cross,
she said, “You should get Robert to play that part. He’d be a natural. He’s your brother.” I don’t know what she was thinking. My brother was a schizophrenic, and you never knew what he would do next. But my mother was nothing if not persistent, so I mentioned it to the studio; they were kind enough to arrange to take pictures of him, but understandably they wouldn’t take the chance.

My mother blamed me, and piled on the guilt. She said, “You’re a big star at the studio. You should be able to get him the part.”

“It’s not up to me,” I said. Not that she heard me.

Sammy Davis Jr. sang a song in
Six Bridges to Cross.
In fact, he was driving to the studio to do some dubbing for the movie when he crashed his car and lost his eye. I don’t know why, but Sammy was nuts about me. It may have had something to do with him being a little younger and less experienced than I was. He took an interest in everything I was doing—the movies I was making, my friends, the girls I liked, you name it. I came to like Sammy very much. He was a gifted performer who could do just about anything on stage, or in front of a camera. When I first met Sammy, he was a sweet and rather delicate person, but then he fell in with Frank Sinatra, and running with Frank’s crowd got Sammy into some deep trouble.

Sammy was close to Jeff Chandler, a Jew from the Bronx who was also a close friend of mine. He was the guy who had done that cameo with me in the bar scene of Frank’s film a few years earlier. Jeff injured his back while he was filming an action picture in the Philippines, and he was hospitalized until he could have surgery to relieve his pain. Tragically, he died on the operating table. By that time Sammy was spending a lot of time gallivanting around with Frank, and he didn’t find a way to visit Jeff in the hospital. I was a pallbearer at Jeff’s memorial service, and I noticed that Sammy didn’t even arrive at the synagogue until after the ceremony had started.

When we all got up to leave at the end of the service, I went over to Sammy and said, “Jeff was looking for you.”

“Well, I was around,” Sammy said.

“No, you weren’t,” I said. “You were chasing Sinatra.”

Sammy said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Things between Sammy and me were never quite the same after that, which was a shame, but I wouldn’t have felt right just letting it slide.

The premiere of
Six Bridges to Cross
was held in Boston. When it was announced that I was coming for the premiere by train from New York, there was a mob scene at the Boston train station. So one stop before my train was to arrive in Boston I was met by a car and driven to the event. The ride took about an hour and a half, and my arrival was timed so I would arrive just in time for the festivities.

When we were ten minutes away, we pulled into a gas station, and I went into the men’s room to change into a fresh suit. I also put on a trick shirt, with sleeves that were held on by only a few thin white threads. The idea was that one of the girls at the scene would pull on my sleeve and we’d have a photographer there to take a picture of fans tearing my clothes off.

We stopped two blocks away from the theater. Lined up in the street were hundreds of teenage girls, every single one of them waiting for
me.
When I got out of the car, there was a roar, and as I was hustled through the crowd girls started tugging at me. To the embarrassment of two ardent fans, the trick shirt worked to perfection!

I loved the fan response I was getting. I was having fun with it. Even though I wasn’t doing the kind of movies I wanted to do, I was thrilled to see that I was becoming so popular.

•                           •                           •

•                           •                           •

I
n 1954
I starred in the only musical I have ever made,
So This Is Paris,
a film about three sailors on leave. Richard Quine directed it, and I danced in the film with Gene Nelson and Paul Gilbert, the other two sailors. Nelson, who staged all the dance numbers, helped me learn the steps. He said, “Put your hand on my shoulder. When you feel my weight shift, you shift.” He was really the first person who ever taught me how to dance.

In the movie, Gloria DeHaven played a woman who ran an orphanage that we adopted. I had never forgotten that electric moment when I had locked eyes with Gloria as a teenager in the Navy, when she had entertained the troops at the Hollywood Canteen in LA. And here I was, years later, making a movie with her—and she was my leading lady! I told her about seeing her at the Hollywood Canteen, and she thought it was very sweet.

Gloria was a beautiful, gracious woman, and I wanted her badly. When we were doing the picture, she let me know it was okay for me to come after her, so between shots we started a relationship. This was one of only two times I actually fell in love with my leading lady (although I enjoyed many a romance that didn’t involve love). I really felt deeply about Gloria. I liked everything about her, including her inherent grace, her beauty, and her ability to carry on our relationship without feeling guilt—or making me feel guilty. She never once put any pressure on me to get a divorce and marry her. It would have driven me to distraction if she had, but she was much too classy for that.

Gloria and I were fortunate enough to be able to spend almost an entire weekend together at the Beverly Hills Hotel. In those days we’d work half days on Saturdays, so this time, as soon as we finished, we both drove to the hotel, went up to our room, and spent the better part of a fabulous few days together. We continued to see each other for a while until everyday life intervened. I still run across Gloria every now and then. I love her to this day.

M
y next movie
,
The Purple Mask,
was a cheap knockoff of
The Scarlet Pimpernel
—and my last swashbuckler. Angela Lansbury played my love interest. During the filming, Angela constantly smiled at me and made nice, but many years later she commented, “Things got so bad for me in the fifties that I had to make a movie with Tony Curtis.” When I heard this I thought to myself, Things could never get bad enough for me to make another movie with you. This gives you an idea of how my career was viewed by some Hollywood insiders. Nor could I completely disagree with them. I was filling seats in the theaters, but the films themselves weren’t classics. Not even close. They were a reflection of Universal’s emphasis on profitable, low-budget movies, pure and simple.

No one outside show business understands how complicated it really is. Everyone thinks actors are rich and famous and lead charmed lives. But to get to the top, you can never be satisfied. I had wanted to be in pictures, and now that I had achieved that goal, I wanted to be in
quality
pictures, and that would mean making some changes.

The Purple Mask
would be one of the last few movies I made at Universal. In 1955, I did two more films for the studio:
The Rawhide Years,
the only western in which I ever starred, and
The Square Jungle,
the Universal version of John Garfield’s and James Cagney’s boxing films.

Arthur Kennedy, an excellent actor who earned five Academy Award nominations, was my costar in
The Rawhide Years.
I also really liked my leading lady, Colleen Miller, a beautiful girl who had a brief film career. The director was Rudolph Maté, who had been a great cameraman for Harry Cohn at Columbia. He had photo graphed Rita Hayworth in the Oscar-winner
Cover Girl,
so they made him head photographer-cinematographer. Then he started directing movies, and this was the second movie I made with him.

During the first movie I made with Rudy, I had noticed that he would shake his head at the end of a scene. He’d say, “Cut. Print,” but his head would be shaking, and I would be upset because I thought he didn’t like what I had done. After a while I noticed his head shook like that all the time, and it had nothing to do with the acting. It was just a tic. Once I got past the feeling that I could never please him, I discovered that Rudy was a very lovable man.

The Square Jungle
was fun to do too. I was a prizefighter, and Ernest Borgnine played my manager. Makeup fixed my nose so I looked like a boxer, and I did the boxing scenes myself, which made me feel good.

In 1955 Janet joined the cast of
My Sister Eileen,
along with Jack Lemmon and Betty Garrett. She had always wanted to be in a musical, and now that she was in one, she trained every day so her dancing and singing would be up to snuff. Her choreographer was Bob Fosse, who had a reputation as quite the lady’s man, even though he was married to actress Joan McCracken.

While Janet was making her movie, I went off every other weekend to spend time with Frank. Janet was okay with that, since she wasn’t around home herself. Then one weekend I came home and found a letter from Fosse to Janet. “I can’t wait to see you,” it said. “When you’re coming, please let me know.”

I couldn’t be absolutely sure, but it certainly looked like Fosse had written a love note to my wife. I was wrecked. Even though Janet and I were distant, I became obsessed with the thought of Janet and Fosse in bed together; I imagined it over and over again, getting more upset each time. The letter brought back the feelings of jealousy I’d had when I pulled up at the studio to pick Janet up and saw Howard Hughes lurking in the shadows.

To make matters worse, Janet was working with Fosse day in and day out, so I got no relief from my jealousy. I decided not to confront her about the note, fearing that Janet would tell me she wanted a divorce. But that didn’t mean I was going to be cuckolded and sit idly by. Sure, I had had affairs myself, but for one thing they always made me feel very guilty, and for another I made damn sure that Janet would never find out about them. I always hoped that if she ever got involved with anyone, I’d never know. Knowing changed everything, or at least that’s what I told myself.

I decided then that I was going to get more out of life. I was thirty years old, in my prime, and I was at a stage in my life and my career when beautiful girls with fabulous figures were constantly throwing themselves at me. In the past I had turned down a lot more advances than I’d accepted, but I decided that from that point on I would partake more fully of the bounty being offered me.

By this time Hugh Hefner had become a good friend of mine. To get away from Janet and Fosse, I flew to Chicago to visit with Hef. That weekend I met some very friendly Playboy bunnies, and I had not even the slightest pangs of guilt about having sex with them. After a week of debauchery in Chicago, I knew I was going to be all right.

I
f marital troubles
had been my only problem, things wouldn’t have been so bad, but I was getting lots of grief from my mother as well. I had bought a group of twelve garden apartments and I had given my parents one of the units to live in, with the understanding that my mother would be responsible for renting out the other units. Even though she had a real estate agent to help her, she was a real pain in the neck about it. She was constantly calling me with complaints about tenants and conflicts that were largely of her own making. Since she was my mother, I couldn’t exactly avoid her calls.

In addition to my marriage and my mother, I had my career to worry about. I was working very hard making movies and doing publicity. My pictures were making a bundle, so the studio kept putting me in movies, but the movies I was in were B pictures, and it was time to step up to A pictures. But the way my contract was worded I didn’t have the right to refuse any of the pictures Universal handed me; when a contract player like me refused a picture, his or her salary got reduced by a fee called a suspension—and I needed the full amount. I had my parents and Robert to support, not to mention my own household. The stress I was under became unbearable, and I sank into a terrible depression.