LAST MAN STANDING

A lone survivor of the famous old-school movie-star set, Tony Curtis has led a rollercoaster life which saw him peak early as a film star, survive an epic battle with drink and drugs, endure six divorces and suffer the early death of several close family members, including his son. Now as he turns 80, Curtis reveals in an exclusive interview how he has found salvation in family and painting

TONY CURTIS is standing on stage at his 80th birthday party surrounded by the things he claims saved his live - and he can't believe his luck. Dressed in a black suit with an open-necked white shirt, he is taking the sincere applause of a host of friends, family, his wife, and all of his children, in the chandeliered ballroom of the MGM Grand casino in Las Vegas. The walls are draped with Caramac coloured curtains and more than 100 of Curtis's large paintings have been hung or placed on easels all around the rectangular room.

After more than a decade at the top of his profession when he starred in such classic films as Spartacus and Some Like It Hot, he "lost interest" in the movie business and started smoking cocaine and drinking his life and career away. Had it not been for his children and his art, he insists, he would now be dead.

Instead he is thriving and, appropriately for a man who now paints every day, he is currently enjoying a renaissance in the twilight years of his extraordinary life. In the past 48 hours he has sold nearly every one ofthe paintings on display here to art collectors from more than 20 countries for a sum that must be close to a million dollars.

"I never thought life would be this good at 80, " Curtis said to me eight hours earlier when we are chatting surrounded by his paintings. "Ain't it neat?"

I have to agree, it's neat.

Here is a man, nay, an icon, whose star rose and shone so quickly and so brightly before being consumed and nearly destroyed by the black hole of drugs, alcohol and messy divorces. A man whose rollercoaster life has seen him experience the death of two brothers and a son, get married six times, including to starlet Janet Leigh, enjoy a brief relationship with Marilyn Monroe, star in more than 100 films, and now make a living as a painter, whose works each sell for up to $30,000 (18,000).

For the past three days he has been staying in a suite at the MGM Grand with his blonde Amazonian wife Jill Vanden Berg, 45 years his junior. Together they have been coming back and forth to this ballroom which has been transformed into a temporary art gallery.

Curtis has agreed to sell all of the paintings here to raise money for his wife's horse sanctuary, Shiloh. At the same time, two evening functions have been planned:

the first a reception for interested and committed art buyers, collectors and gallery owners who are being offered the chance to buy the pieces before the general public; the second a much more intimate evening with all of Curtis's family present to wish him a happy 80th birthday.

He has agreed to be interviewed and photographed between the two - extending an invitation to me to attend both events.

While most people, understandably, think of Curtis as a famous actor, art has always played a big part in his life. "As children we grew up watching him paint.

We didn't grow up with a movie star, we grew up with a painter. That's what he was to us, " his daughter, actress Jamie Lee Curtis, tells me at the birthday party.

Watching him as he presses the flesh at the first reception he talks enthusiastically about his art, which he describes as a mix of "expressionism and impressionism".

Heis all smiles and funny faces for Joe and Josephine Public with their digital cameras and proffered pens seeking their own immortalised moments with one of the last surviving old-school stars of the silver screen. Like the true gentleman he turns out to be, he agrees to every request.

Every one just calls him Tony. He is from that era filled with actors all so famous and legendary that their first name would do:

Marlon, Marilyn, Frank, Dean, Rock, Orson. He may not have been the greatest, but he is the only one still standing.

I get to the ballroom shortly before Curtis is due to meet me. Looking at all of his art collected together you can see it is obviously the work of one man. He has been heavily influenced by Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse, and the colour in the collection of still lifes and portraits leaps out at you.

I'm looking at a picture of a goldfish in a bowl (a metaphor, perhaps) when I hear an unmistakable voice; it is striking how much life it has in it. I turn round to see a small man dressed in a thin blue jumper and white, knee-length linen shorts talking to some of the staff near the room's entrance.

He is kissing some women he is introduced to on the back of their hands and they are blushing. Tony Curtis has arrived.

He is instantly recognisable: his lively hair, now grey, has receded a little but far less than you might expect (it's definitely not a wig); his eyebrows have shrunk and he has liver spots on his hands and right cheek; his skin is tanned but weathered and wrinkled and he has put on a lot of weight around his middle; his radiant blue eyes appear to have dulled somewhat but, without the heavy make- up he wears for TV appearances, he looks real and genuine and warm.

We shake hands and wander over to the middle of the ballroom. Curtis settles into a leather armchair while I sit on a suede sofa to his right.

I'm expecting to be regaled with stories of the good old days and listen to him chat about his art, while I take notes on his appearance and his manner. But, over the next hour, Curtis opens up in a way I could never have expected.

BORN Bernard Schwartz, in New York, in 1925, Curtis had a younger brother, Julius, who was killed in a road accident when he was nine. His parents were Jewish Hungarian immigrants and his relationship with them was never easy.

"My mother was a neurotic woman and came from a very neurotic environment so she couldn't be anything else. That was her life, " he tells me. "My father just didn't want to get involved. He worked hard as a tailor, but he wanted to be laid back and easy, but by the time he got to be 46, he had a huge heart attack before I went to Hollywood and then had another one later. They took half a lung away from him because he smoked Lucky Strikes everyday, two or three packs. That was his sadness."

In 1940, when Curtis was 15, his parents had another child, Robert, who suffered from schizophrenia, making Curtis's home life even more traumatic (Robert died in a mental institution in California, in 1992).

"Before the war I was able to enlist early at 17 and I liked the idea because I didn't have to hang around home any more, " he says reaching down for a cup of black coffee a waiter has brought over. "I didn't want to have to go delivering my father's clothing for customers all over the city. I didn't like it.

It led nowhere. I had no ability, absolutely none, to improve my life. I had very little education. I could read, write, and had a little arithmetic but I had no social graces."

So, in 1942, Curtis joined the Navy and travelled the world until 1946, never involved in combat. When he returned home he started taking acting classes.

A theatrical agent saw one of his early performances and, mesmerised by this young Adonis, she offered to represent him and sent him to Hollywood where he was quickly offered a seven-year contract with Universal Pictures, undoubtedly on the strength of his looks rather than his experience. He admits he knew he was good- looking, and that his looks would help him get ahead.

"Oh, I knew that ever since I was a kid, " he says leaning back in the armchair. "I used to notice how people looked at me. And I liked it. . . and I knew I was going to make it."

Curtis was unquestionably a good looking, sexy and sexual young man. As we are sitting chatting, a clip reel of his old films is playing on a plasma screen behind his head. I keep looking at it to see those magnetising eyes, the triangular torso, the perfect head of hair, and his beguiling smile. Today, time has stolen his youthful looks and his buffed physique, but he still looks pretty good for an octogenarian. I ask him if has a secret.

"Huh?" he says, his hearing being the only faculty which occasionally fails him.

I repeat the question.

"Oh. I have a dermatologist who gave me a lot of creams, " he tells me. "But he is all prepared to send me to an excellent surgeon when I think I need it. Around the eyes maybe."

So he hasn't had any work done yet?

"I had some behind this ear, " he says. "I had a cyst and they cleaned it up for me."

I'm not sure that they didn't do a little more than clean up a cyst, but who cares? If Curtis wants to be a little coy about his looks, who can blame him? He says he was always treated differently in Hollywood because of the way he looked.

"I was considered a homosexual just by my looks, " he tells me. "I was treated in a disdainful manner as a boy in the movies."

Iask if that upset him?

"It did. It diiiiid, " he says stretching the word to emphasise the point. "I wasn't prepared for that. And that's where my vanity came in. I said how can they treat me like this? What have I done? So I counterbalanced this feeling of inadequacy with my vainful gestures. I made it a point when I went out to make sure I looked as good as I could."

Not surprisingly Curtis's good looks and a love of the opposite sex, and indeed sex, were more than enough to ensure he got far more than his fair share of women.

He tells me that he thought his contract stipulated that he had to have sex with all of his leading ladies. "And with only a few exceptions, I did, " he says smiling.

Having changed his name to Tony Curtis (arrived at after Anglicising the name of a Hungarian relative, Kertez), he did a string of movies throughout the Fifties where he received above-the- title billing: Trapeze and Sweet Smell Of Success with Burt Lancaster;

The Vikings with Kirk Douglas; The Defiant Ones with Sidney Poitier; The Perfect Furlough with Janet Leigh (whom he married in 1951); and most notably, in 1959, Some Like It Hot, with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe.

Curtis didn't get an Oscar nomination for Some Like It Hot; Jack Lemmon did.

While the snub from the Academy upset Curtis, he never held it against his co-star.

"I liked Jack a lot, he was my buddy, " Curtis says, "And he was one of those leading ladies I never had an affair with."

He can't say the same of Marilyn Monroe.

In the past Curtis has been reluctant to open up about the details of his relationship with the blonde siren, perturbed at people's obvious interest in a woman with whom he had a terrible time working on Some Like It Hot. He has been quoted as saying kissing her was "like kissing Hitler".

In his autobiography published in 1993, he admits to spending a night with Monroe at a friend's beach house long before he worked with her, but he says little more than that. "We never forgot that time [in 1949] and it wasn't until Sweet Smell Of Success [in 1957] that we got back together again, " he admits now. "But it was already a little late. Janet was pregnant with Jamie and Marilyn was going through a lot of disastrous experiences: they were going to drop her from a movie; she became tarty.

"So Marilyn and I were only a short time together. Well, we were about four months together, or five months, but not steady, you know. But enough to see that we both needed each other. We enjoyed each other.

She was quite neurotic in one peculiar way and I was neurotic in another way."

What were the different neuroses?

"You know I wasn't sure of myself and wanting all of these dreams, " says Curtis.

"Marilyn on the other hand knew they were possible for her. She knew all she had to do was drop on her knees and she would get any part she wanted."

So, I ask, do you think it would ever have worked out between the two of you?

"No, " he says sounding somewhat sad thinking about this period in his life. "I now know that had we ever got over the heat of living together and being together that she and I were both so eh . . . what's the word I'm looking for . . . we were both so empowered with wanting to be successful we could never have shared it with each other. We could never take second billing to each other."

So what was the 'kissing Hitler' remark all about?

"I never said it, " he tells me. "She had been missing work for days and stories came out that she said Billy Wilder [the director] had lost his touch, Jack Lemmon wasn't very funny and I was too stiff as the leading man. And so I was said to have said kissing her was like kissing Hitler. United Artists, the PR department came up with those things because the head of the studio said she was giving us a lot of trouble and wanted to be prepared if they needed to fire her, to have the ammunition for it."

So was she a good kisser?

"Oh she waaaaas, " Curtis says with a terribly knowing smile. "I would rate her very high."

The other successful actress in Curtis's life was Janet Leigh. Their marriage lasted 11 years and produced two children, Jamie and Kelly, but Curtis says that the fact that they were both actors caused problems.

"When we met, Janet wasn't a major player, but she was an important player, " he tells me. "And when I came along at the speed at which I was operating she found herself in a second position, which was difficult for her and she behaved in such a way that it didn't seem to make much difference, but it did. It did. It kind of soured her and made her angry and that was part of what our divorce was about."

Leigh was quoted in Curtis's autobiography as saying: "I loved him very much: the fact that we divorced was just two people going in different directions. We've all done things we're not proud of, but the disintegration of a relationship does not mean that one or the other person is bad."

Less than a year after their divorce Curtis married actress Christine Kaufman. That marriage also produced two daughters, Alexandra and Allegra, but lasted only four years. His third marriage to Leslie Allen, produced two sons, Nicholas and Ben.

After they divorced in 1982, he married a further two times, but neither marriage produced children. Then at the age of 68, he met 23- year-old Jill Vanden Berg and married her in 1998 (why change the habit of a lifetime? ).

Curtis says that all of his previous marriage breakdowns were hard to deal with. "The divorces were all very difficult for me, " he says honestly. "I had to move out of the houses. I didn't want to live in them anyway, you got it, but then end up in apartments again and alone. I didn't like it."

By the early Seventies, the continual peaks and troughs of his life were wearing him out; he became lethargic and depressed. "I was disillusioned by marriages, by my films, by my friends, people I thought were friends all of a sudden abandoned me, " he says slowly. "I had no pleasure. I wasn't getting the kind of movies I wanted. I had lost my drive and energy. Then I started doing drugs. I thought it would give me back my energy. And it did. No question about it. But it didn't last. It was a very short time. And there I was in the dumps again.

And I stayed in the dumps."

No glib showbiz answers here. Curtis sits silently for a moment and looks off into the middle distance. He looks at me and says almost mournfully: "I had started out so gloriously and then all of a sudden I found myself in the muck and the mire, you know."

I ask if that hurt as much as it looks like it did. "Oh very much so. Very much so, " he says nodding slowly.

So did he think of himself as a failure?

"I did, you know, " he says. "But I knew there was something there because it was given to me originally and I knew that drugs or bad marriages didn't destroy those things. What destroys them is yourself.

Accepting the vicissitudes as your own and not other people's."

He checked into the Betty Ford rehab clinic at the insistence of his children and started going to therapy sessions.

"I needed the crutches of therapy, " he tells me. "I was able to slowly begin to lose my desire for substances and find another reason too for getting clean and sober: I wanted to see my boys grow up. But ironically one of my sons died from an overdose of heroin. How ironic was that?"

He pauses and chews his bottom lip then says: "That was a very difficult time in mylife losing a son. . . but it happened."

During this period he claims he realised the therapeutic value of painting and drawing. "I always found that a way of feeling better, " he says brightening a little and turning his head to look at his assembled works, releasing who knows what memories.

Today his career as an artist is unquestionably successful. A few people I talk to during the reception in the gallery gush with praise, but I sense the name of the artist is as much of an appeal as the paintings themselves. Nevertheless, as Curtis paints so frequently, he has made serious money from his art.

"Imagine at 80, " he says leaning forward and touching my arm, "I've got the same run I had when I was 24."

I have to keep reminding myself he is indeed 80. He might look like an old man, and occasionally mix up his words, but his mind is sound and he has a genuine joie de vivre. He says he swims every day and likes to fence, although very gently I presume.

He recently filmed a blink-and-you'llmiss-it cameo appearance in the American crime drama, CSI. He tells me he agreed to do it because Quentin Tarantino, who directed the episode, is a friend of his.

"I met him at a party and he kept pumping me for stories about movies, " he says. "I like him a lot, so I said I'd do it."

I'm about to ask him a question about writing novels when he says, "By George, I think we're done aren't we, pal?" After an hour of chatting I can see he has become tired. We stand up, I thank him for his time and he gives me a hug. I feel quite touched.

He walks slowly over to his wife. She takes his hand and they head off back to their suite. Watching him and Vanden Berg together, they certainly look incongruous, but happy nevertheless.

When I see him again a few hours later at his party, he looks rejuvenated. He is shaking hands and chatting with anyone that seeks him out or makes their way through the crowds around him. I can see how much it all means to him.

At one point his five surviving children all take to the stage to present him with a huge, obviously fake birthday cake.

"It's filled with my father's favourite filling, " says Jamie Lee, just before a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like, pops out and sings a sweet version of Happy Birthday.

When the speeches are finished, I approach a table where two of his other daughters, Kelly and Alexandra, are sitting.

I ask them what they admire the most about their famous father.

"His capacity to love and his capacity for love, " Kelly tells me.

"I think he is so intelligent and smart, " says Alexandra, "And I don't think many people necessarily see that."

As we're talking Curtis himself comes over to the table. Standing proudly between his blue-eyed daughters and, with love and life in his own eyes, he looks at me, smiles and says, "Ain't it neat?"

CSI is on Channel 5 on July 12. For more information on Tony Curtis's art, log on to www. tonycurtisart. com

Copyright 2005 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.