American Prince (30 page)

Ray Milland was best known for playing a falling-down drunk in the famous
Lost Weekend.
He was part of the WASP old guard, and I always felt he might be an anti-Semite. One time I overheard him and his group discussing the usurpers who were trying to get into Hollywood. He wasn’t talking about me, but he mentioned a producer’s wife who was Jewish. I knew he was one of the people who subscribed to the theory that I had married Janet Leigh as a career move. Milland was poison, so I just stayed away from him as much as possible.

The success of
The Last Tycoon
encouraged me. I thought my performance was good, and the picture did well, so I hoped I might get some more high-quality work. But it wasn’t to be. I did earn a little money, but my next three pictures were all made by second-rate independent producers. The first one was a German production titled
Casanova & Co.,
and it was also known as
Some Like It Cool.
Once again I had to wear a dress, this time to escape from prison. The producers were trying to riff on
Some Like It Hot,
but the plot was stupid and forced. The director, Franz Antel, was way out of his league. When I got to Venice to start shooting, there was no script, but they had set aside three hundred thousand dollars to pay me, so I went ahead and did what I could. My female costars were Britt Ekland, Marisa Berenson, and Marisa Mell. They were interchangeable Hollywood starlets in a shitty film. And they were my costars, so what did that say about me? It was depressing.

My next film was
The Manitou,
a horror thriller that still shows up periodically on late-night TV. Stella Stevens was in it, as was Susan Strasberg, Paula’s daughter. I never talked to Susan about her mother. The movie, which was filmed in LA, was cheaply made and needed a lot more money than it got for its special effects. It’s one of those movies where you ask yourself,
What is Tony Curtis doing in
that
movie?

I then had a very strange experience starring in a movie called
Sextette,
based on a play written by eighty-five-year-old Mae West. I agreed to do it because they paid me a hundred and fifty grand for six weeks’ work. It was the last movie Mae ever made. Mae had starred in vaudeville and on the stage before beginning her film career in 1932, when she was almost forty. She gave Cary Grant his big break by insisting he play her leading man in
She Done Him Wrong
and
I’m No Angel.
Those movies were so successful that they saved Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy.

In
Sextette
I played Mae’s forty-year-old Russian lover. This is the film where she utters her famous line to George Hamilton: “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?” But she had another line I liked even better. When my character sees her in her bedroom, I say to her, “Remember the songs I used to sing to you in my native tongue on the Volga, many years ago?”

She looks at me and says, “I don’t remember the songs you used to sing to me, but I remember your native tongue.”

Mae was tough to work with because she could be completely oblivious to a line or a cue, and she wasn’t too good with names either. One day she and George Hamilton were working with the director to block a scene, and the director said to her, “You’re going to come out first and go to the window, Mae, and then George is going to come in center stage.”

Mae looked at the director and said, “Who’s George?” She didn’t have Alzheimer’s or dementia; she was just so narcissistic that she had forgotten his name. The only person in the movie who mattered to her was Mae West.

Mae was pretty bad about taking direction, too. The propman would lie on the floor, out of sight of the camera, grab her ankles and turn them so she would know which way to turn, left or right. As I said, Mae didn’t know her lines, so the director sat in a closed booth just outside the scene and read her lines into a microphone that transmitted his voice over a shortwave radio signal. Mae had an earpiece that would broadcast the director’s voice into her ear, and she simply repeated the lines as she heard them. The director would smoke while he was in there reading her lines to her, until the booth would become so full of smoke you couldn’t see him anymore. When he coughed, so did she. I would stand there, watching this, thinking,
This is crazy.

One time I was doing a scene with Mae, and we had the setup with the booth and the microphone going. The director said, “Action,” and I gave my line, and Mae replied, “Altercation on Melrose and Sunset. Approach with caution.”

The director yelled, “Cut!” Everyone looked at each other; those words weren’t in the script. The director asked her what she was talking about, and she said something like, “Units are en route.” Then we realized that Mae’s earpiece had been intercepting signals from a police shortwave radio. I couldn’t help myself. I averted my face and walked off stage, hoping no one could see that I was laughing hysterically.

My biggest problem with Mae was that she was as bad as Marilyn in terms of showing up on time. I’d arrive at eight in the morning in order to be ready at nine. Mae, who had the same start time I did, wouldn’t come onto the set until eleven or eleven thirty. After a week or two of this, I went to the assistant director and said, “Why are you calling me two hours before Mae shows up?”

“Because I never know when she’s going to get here,” he said.

I said, “How far away does she live?”

“About forty-five minutes.”

“What does she do when she gets here?”

He said, “She comes in and takes some time to put on her makeup. That’s a forty-five-minute ordeal. Then they fit her with hair. That’s thirty minutes. Then wardrobe: forty minutes. The last thing is her enema, and then she’s ready for work.”

I said, “What time is the enema?”

“The enema comes after everything else is done. She doesn’t wear panties, and after she has her enema, she’s ready for work.”

“How long does the enema take?”

“About fifteen minutes.”

I said, “Call me fifteen minutes before she takes her enema.”

The next day I waited most of the morning at home, until the assistant director called.

“Enema time,” he said.

I leaped into my Rolls-Royce convertible, tore down the streets of Hollywood to Goldwyn Studios, parked my car, rushed in, had my makeup put on, and hit the stage ready to work just as Mae emerged from the bathroom, her enema finished. Once I’d mastered the intricacies of this schedule, I had no complaints.

When I signed on to this film, I had certainly heard about Mae’s legendary sexual appetites. I didn’t want her even looking at me, but she had brought her bodybuilder boyfriend with her, so I relaxed. As I got to know her I realized she was actually a sweet, caring, very nice person—a little self-absorbed perhaps, but that hardly made her stand out in Hollywood.

Another reason I had agreed to be in
Sextette
was that Cary Grant had made movies with Mae West, and if she was good enough for Cary, she was good enough for me. But the truth is that I was feeling sorry for myself. Marlon Brando was still getting good parts, so why was Hollywood pissing on me? But I took comfort in being a consummate professional: even in these B movies, I gave each scene all I had. Never once did I go into a movie thinking,
This thing is going to be shit, so I’m not going to prepare for it.
I couldn’t do that. I even busted my tail for
The Manitou.

My professionalism was sorely tested, though, by schlock films and sequels like
The Bad News Bears Go to Japan,
which was the third in the series started by Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal. By the time we got to this movie, however, we were working on a pale rehash at best. Walter got about eight hundred grand for the first one; I got about a hundred and fifty for mine. But to my astonishment I ended up loving the experience of making this film. I enjoyed working with the cast, and one of my favorite scenes in the movie took place when my character stepped in the ring with this massive Japanese sumo wrestler. This guy was throwing me all over the place, and my boys didn’t want to see this guy beating me up so badly, so they jumped into the ring and stopped him. It was a lot of fun, and the movie actually did very well.

In 1978 I made
It Rained All Night the Day I Left
in Israel, with Lou Gossett. I flew from LA to Washington, D.C., where I boarded an El Al plane. I was strapping into my seat in the upstairs section of the 747 when the pilot made an announcement: “We’re going to hold the plane half an hour because the prime minister, Menachem Begin, will be flying with us.” He, Anwar Sadat, and President Jimmy Carter had just finished their historic peace meeting at Camp David.

I was standing in the entry hall of the plane when Moshe Dayan, the Israeli general and foreign minister, walked in. I introduced myself, as did he, and I was impressed by the easy warmth of his personality. Later Menachem Begin came into our section of the plane and motioned for me to come back and visit with him and his wife. The next morning we had breakfast together, and when the plane landed, I met Shimon Peres, the former defense minister. This was all very heady stuff for a Jewish kid from New York!

When we started making
It Rained All Night the Day I Left,
I said to myself—as I did before every movie—
I’m going to make this a great movie.
We almost made it a good movie, but our director, Nicolas Gessner, was not up to the job. He didn’t like me, which I could live with, but he also kept questioning what I was doing, which didn’t work at all. Finally, right in front of Gessner I said to Lou Gossett, “Let’s not pay any attention to him, so we can go ahead and get this picture made.” Gessner laughed, but I was serious. He was a
putz.

Things got worse. Gessner would say to the cast, “Tony seems to know it all, so why don’t you tell us what to do, Tony?” So I would tell him.

One time he said, “I want a close-up on Tony. Put a twenty-meter lens on the camera.”

I said, “You’re not going to get a close-up with a twenty-meter lens. You’ll need a fifty-meter lens. After that, put in a wide-angle, and
then
shoot the master. You’ll be able to fit one of the close-ups into the master. Don’t do it the other way around.”

He harrumphed and said, “I know that.” Maybe he did, but I couldn’t figure out why he’d want to keep that knowledge to himself. I knew from past experience that I was no director, but I was a genius compared with this guy.

It Rained All Night the Day I Left
was a terrible movie, but I loved Israel, and the Israelis loved me. During the shoot I lived in Tel Aviv, and on days when I didn’t have to work, a tour guide would come by in the morning and take me all around the country, which, of course, is tiny. The El Al pilots let me sit with them during takeoffs and landings, and we would talk about my films. I even stayed for a few nights with an Israeli pilot whom I befriended while we were on location.

He and his family lived in an unassuming house, and he said to me, “Why don’t you move to Israel, take Israeli citizenship, and live here? The movies aren’t going to last forever.” He was very practical, and it made a lot of sense. I was on the verge of doing it, partly because it would allow me to be as far away from Penny as possible. Sadly, the leaks in our marriage that I had seen earlier had only grown larger with time. But after I really thought about it, I realized that living in Israel was a pipe dream. I still had a career of sorts, and as long as that was the case, I needed to stay in LA.

When I came home, my children Nicholas and Benjamin were waiting for me with their mother. I was tanned and relaxed, and the boys were thrilled to see me. But something told me that my marriage to Penny was over. I could tell just by her attitude. She was young and beautiful, so she inevitably attracted a lot of attention from hip, young men in Hollywood. I wasn’t around too often, and the combination was poison to our marriage.

As I had seen earlier, Penny had a tendency to go with the best thing that came along, and at some point she decided that I was no longer the best thing. I told myself that had I been making better movies, I might have had a chance, but that was just another way to put the focus back on my work. Once Penny began making the nightclub scene, our relationship went downhill fast. She began seeing other guys, and marriage number three bit the dust. In retrospect, she was too young, and I was too messed up, and we both would have been better off if we hadn’t gotten married. But that’s hindsight talking.

My life had become exhausting and empty. I was well into my fifties, the 1980s were just around the corner, and I had no idea what to do with myself.

Cocaine

S
oon after I
came home from Israel, Penny brought up the subject of divorce, just as I had feared. For the third time I was in a marriage going down the drain. I was a mess, but I didn’t stop making movies. I felt like it was the only thing I really knew how to do.

In 1978 I acted in a film called
Title Shot,
about a mobster who tries to fix a fight. Les Rose directed it. It was a good payday, as was
Little Miss Marker,
one of two pictures I did shortly thereafter for Universal. Walter Matthau played a bookie, and I was cast as the heavy, Blackie. Julie Andrews played the girlfriend. I had fun doing it because Walter and I were together again. I loved that guy.

My next movie,
The Mirror Crack’d,
was based on an Agatha Chris tie novel about a group of actors who come to an English home to make a film. While they’re there, somebody gets murdered. The cast included Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, and Angela Lansbury, who played Miss Marple, the detective. I loved doing the movie with Elizabeth. She and I had a wonderful connection, which involved lots of good times but never crossed the line from friendship to romance. Kim Novak was sweet and very perceptive. She lived in northern California, outside San Francisco. Rumor had it that she was a lesbian, but we never talked about it, and I found her professional and easy to work with.

I hit another low point in my acting career in 1980, when Neil Simon and Herb Ross hired me to perform in a play called
I Oughta Be in Pictures.
I first met Ross at a restaurant. I was having dinner alone when he invited me over to his table and told me he was going to direct a play. Would I consider being in it? He was pleasant enough. I liked the title of the play, and when he told me what it was about—a down-on-his-luck guy who was a writer in the movies—I said I’d do it. I was already leaning in that direction because I had a good relationship with Neil Simon, who wrote the play.

I signed on for a good salary and a percentage, but when we started rehearsals, Ross turned out to be the most disagreeable man I had ever met. He was very dictatorial, with a mean streak that he loosed on everyone in the cast. I was a favorite lightning rod for Ross’s nastiness because he and I disagreed about how I should play my character. He’d tell me what he wanted, and I’d listen and nod, and then I’d turn around and play the part the way I thought it ought to be played. I knew what I was doing. I wanted the character to have the energy and drive that only comes from a New York background. I knew what this guy was like. He was like me: angry, aggressive, and fighting to get out of the mess he was in.

Meanwhile, Neil Simon was rewriting lines like crazy. If the problem with the play was the way I was portraying my character, then why was Neil spending so much time rewriting the script? The material obviously wasn’t working, and it wasn’t my fault. But try telling Ross that. He took being abusive to a new level. In rehearsal, he’d turn to me and say, “Don’t you know how to do this? After all those years in the movies, you’d think you’d know how to make an exit.”

At the end of rehearsal, I’d go out to the parking lot and get into my car, but I didn’t want to go home because things with Penny had hit rock bottom. I had no place else to go, so I drove to a downtown parking garage and slept in my Trans Am, which is no easy thing to do. Where were my friends? I didn’t know. At the time I was so depressed that it didn’t seem like I had any friends at all. I was living life in the lower depths. It was terrible. I told myself there was light at the end of the tunnel, but I honestly didn’t think I was going to make it.

We opened in Los Angeles, and despite constant rewrites that forced me to keep relearning my lines, I could tell from the audience’s reaction that I had done a terrific job. The next stop for the play after our run in LA was Broadway, and I was looking forward to that. Then one evening the propman, who was a friend, called me over. He said, “I overheard Herb Ross talking with Neil backstage, and Herb said, ‘We’ll get rid of him,’ and Neil said, ‘Who will we get?’ and Herb said, ‘Maybe Walter Matthau.’” Well, there was no one else in the play whom Walter could have replaced except me.

“You know this for a fact?” I said.

“That’s what I heard him say.”

At that very moment I was taking a break, halfway through the evening performance. I thought for a moment. I was being double-teamed. Neil wanted me out because I had negotiated a percentage, and Ross, the fucker, wanted me out because he had no control over me. I might have handled this news with more resilience if my marriage hadn’t been disintegrating and if I wasn’t sleeping fitfully in my car every night. But I just didn’t have much bounce at the time. Between the rewrites, the abuse, and the rejections, I had finally had had it.

When my cue came, I went out onto the stage and played a scene where my girlfriend and I are nasty to each other. My part ended with a tirade, which closed with the line “You’re a mean kid, and I don’t know why.” I ad-libbed an additional “Fuck you,” and then I walked off the stage before I was supposed to, and out of the play. I went up to my dressing room, picked up my little bag, and walked out to my car. I got in, fired it up, and drove off. Ding dong, the witch is dead.

Boy, did I feel good. Fuck ’em. There was no way I would work under those conditions, for them or anyone else. I was told later that my performance that night had been excellent. When the play opened on Broadway, Ron Leibman was playing my role, and Walter Matthau played it in the movie. I’m certainly biased, but I felt both variations lost something in translation.

O
ne afternoon
I checked my mail and found a letter to Penny from City National Bank. Curious, I opened the envelope. Inside was a check for one hundred thousand dollars, made out to her, taken out of
my
account. Our divorce negotiations were still under way at that point, but we certainly hadn’t agreed to anything like this. She was being under handed, pure and simple, and I had caught her. I called my lawyer and asked him to call the bank and stop the check. We stopped the divorce negotiations, and instead I simply dictated terms that Penny was obliged to accept. She wound up getting a lot less out of me than she otherwise might have. After the divorce was final, Penny moved to Cape Cod. The settlement gave her all the furniture in our home, so she opened an antique shop and put all our furniture in the shop as merchandise.

To get away from my mess with Penny, I spent three full months in 1980 with Hugh Hefner at his mansion. Hef was a steadying influence for me, the kind of guy I could tell anything to and he would understand. I was so vulnerable in those days that I fell for every girl I met at the mansion. There was hardly anyone around to take them out, and Hef didn’t want them floating around the city unescorted, so I always had a girl on my arm.

But there were boundaries, even at the Playboy Mansion. Romances were to be conducted on the grounds, not taken to a hotel room or to someone’s home. The idea was to have a place where you could have some wholesome fun, a place that wasn’t sleazy. Life at the mansion felt like being on a luxurious college campus. Guests enjoyed private talks in the garden or watched movies in Hef’s screening room. The girls were happy to spend time with me, and I behaved properly. I enjoyed their friendship, and where appropriate, I enjoyed romancing them. The pleasure of spending time with these beautiful girls and having them find me attractive calmed me and made me feel good. That was far more important to me than the sex.

During that time I got to know Dorothy Stratten, a really sweet, beautiful girl. I also met her husband, Paul Snider, whom I disliked immediately. There was something untrustworthy and disturbing about him. He was a tight-lipped man whose eyes darted around the room, but if someone came over to talk to him, he would instantly change into an affable, friendly fellow. Anytime Dorothy was talking to another man, though, he’d suddenly materialize, jealous as he could be. He never let her out of his sight.

Hef was ill at ease with Snider. Everyone could see that Dorothy was much too good for him. When the director Peter Bogdanovich met her, he was smitten, and they fell in love. But when Dorothy told Snider she wanted a divorce, he murdered her and killed himself. It was a terrible tragedy that no one could have predicted, although it was obvious to us all that Paul Snider was trouble waiting to happen.

When I wasn’t falling in love with one of the girls at the Playboy Mansion, I lived pretty much like a hermit. I spent most of my time in my room at the mansion, and occasionally I’d go down to a party or watch a movie. As the evening went on, if I didn’t feel like socializing anymore, I’d go back up to my room.

After Penny moved out and took our sons, Benjamin and Nicholas, with her, I left the mansion and went back to live alone in our condo. There I was, living in luxury, miserable, waiting for jobs that weren’t coming in. Many of my contemporaries had already prepared themselves for the day when they would no longer be called on to act. They had begun writing, directing, or producing.

Lew Wasserman had tried to encourage me along those lines, but I wasn’t interested. As far as I was concerned, directing a film didn’t have much appeal. For one thing, I didn’t think I was very good at it, and for another, it seemed a little like cheating or playing it safe. A director didn’t have to come up with the emotions that allowed an actor entry into a character’s inner workings. A director didn’t have to find a way to interact with another actor as if their characters were real people. To me, being in front of the camera was where the creativity in filmmaking lay, and that was all I was interested in. Unfortunately, at the moment that meant I wasn’t doing anything at all. When I first hit Hollywood, I had really made a splash. Now the phone was silent. It was as if I had died, only someone forgot to tell me about it.

I
t was during
this time—the early 1980s—that I began dabbling with what had become a very fashionable drug in Hollywood and other major cities around the country: cocaine. When the cocaine craze hit, no one knew how addictive it could be. Everyone knew about the dangers of heroin, but people thought coke was something you could try when you felt like it and stop using whenever you wanted to. I’m sure that dealers encouraged that misconception.

I was introduced to cocaine during the making of
Lepke.
We were working long, grueling hours, and I was getting tired. Then one day a woman in wardrobe said to me, “Here, try some of this.” She took a small paper packet out of her pocket, opened it up, and shook some white powder out of it onto a mirror. She handed me a little straw and told me to sniff some powder up each nostril. Almost immediately, I felt comforted by a new sense of confidence, and I noticed that even though it was well past midnight, I was full of energy. I took another hit, kept the paper packet, and worked until four in the morning. The next day I paid the woman for more. It was the start of my descent into hell.

Before long, the cocaine epidemic wrecked Hollywood. Actors became so addicted that they demanded coke in their contracts. A friend of mine at Paramount told me a story about Dodi Al-Fayed, one of the producers of
Chariots of Fire.
Dodi’s father owned Harrods department store in London and was one of the richest and kindest men in the world. Dodi had told his father he wanted to be a Hollywood producer, and Dodi’s father had made it happen. Anyway, my friend recounted a conversation between Dodi and Bob Evans, the head of Paramount. Dodi told Bob, “I’m having trouble with one of the actors. He wants me to get him some cocaine, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“What don’t you know?” asked Evans.

“It’s so expensive,” Dodi said. “Where am I going to get the money?”

Bob said, “Well, just charge it to the transportation department.” Apparently finding ways to bury the cost of cocaine was common practice in Hollywood during that time.

Around this time I moved out of the modern condominium I’d shared with Penny and the boys, and into a small apartment. And I started doing cocaine on a regular basis. Once I began using heavily, I found myself involved with unsavory people I didn’t even know. When you’re hooked on drugs, you have no close friends, just druggie friends. That makes you feel totally alone, which makes you want to take drugs even more. It’s a vicious cycle.

My head wasn’t on straight, and although I knew it, I didn’t know what to do about it. The cocaine gave me a brief feeling of euphoria, which was the best feeling I could manage in those days. I told myself that if I controlled my use, and chose my friends more carefully, I’d be able to stop whenever I wanted to. As it turned out, it wasn’t so easy.

One of the big reasons I started using cocaine was that I was told it was great for sex. Specifically, I heard that it made men less sensitive, allowing them to prolong the time before orgasm. This sounded good to me, so I bought some coke and started seeing lots of women, testing out what I’d heard. It didn’t make me superhuman in the longevity department, but it certainly did make my sexual experiences more intense.