![[Valid Atom 1.0]](valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
BBC MUNDO RADIO
Lichfield/Getty
In 1995, my editor asked me what story I wanted to write.
"Tony Curtis," I said.
"Tony Curtis? Why Tony Curtis?" At the time, Tony Curtis was the definition of a has-been; he had gone from iconic leading man to a kind of spectacularly turned-out hanger-on, flagrantly bewigged and ultimately reduced in scale by the platinum-haired giantess he'd chosen to accompany him through his Hollywood haunts.
"Because he's 70," I said, "and he still gets laid."
It was the easiest sale I've ever made. I went out to Hollywood, and spent a week with Tony Curtis — that almost Flinstoneian fiction of a name, the closest a human being has ever come to being called Cary Granite. I ate with him (Spago, of course), drank with him (Patron tequila, with a side of painkillers), danced with him (and with his wife Jill, the giantess), and sat beside him as he went 100 mph in his Mustang, giggling all the way (literally: "tee hee"). And I counseled him, as he counseled me in return.
You see, he was more than an avatar of a way of life and a style of celebrity that didn't exist anymore. He was even more than what he represented — Hollywood — and even more than what he was, which was, of course, a star. He was, pardon the term, an existentialist, as unflinching in his estimation of himself as he was in his estimation of others, as he was in his conversations with me. He took himself seriously, but as a comic character. As an actor, he was never quite as convincing in heroic roles as he was when he revealed an element of cowardice, and so he was, to my mind, brave. As a young man, he was intoxicated by his own beauty, and the kind of life it would allow him; in middle age, when some of his beauty faded, he couldn't let the intoxication go, and became an addict, losing everything, from his hair (a primal wound in a man of Tony's dark vanity) to his son, who followed the course of his father and overdosed. When I met him, he was a man who swallowed, every morning, the full draught of regret an American life could offer, and yet went about his days (and nights: his very late nights) determined to get intoxicated — intoxicated by what was left of his beauty; intoxicated by the fantastic fact of the freedom his beauty still afforded him in Hollywood and in America; intoxicated, at this late stage of the game, by his potential, even while he was intoxicated on tequila and painkillers — and stay that way. And, yes, he still got laid, in those pre-Viagra days, with a dose of prostaglandins he injected in his thigh to give him an erection post-prostate surgery. Tee-hee!
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.
And yet I lied, when I told my editor that I wanted to write about Tony Curtis because he was 70 and still getting laid. In truth — the kind of truth you don't tell your editors when you're pitching a story — I was trying to figure out the kind of life I wanted to lead at the time, trying to figure out the decisions that I had to make, trying to figure out the legacy I wanted to follow. I was casting about for a father figure. Oh, sure, I had a father, but my father wanted to be Frank Sinatra or Tony Curtis, in no particular order, and on some days thought he was. And so I wrote a profile of Frank Sinatra, Jr., to figure out what it was like to be the son of the real thing, and pitched the Tony profile to prepare for the task of profiling my father himself — Tony Curtis was the second installment in the Lou Junod Trilogy. But as a result, there was, as Tony told me the only time we met after the story was published, "always something there between you and me, from the start" — some fellow feeling, some willingness to lead and be led, and of all the famous people I've ever spent time with, Tony was one of the very few who let me know that I could call him, anytime, and he would be happy to hear from me. Until the day he died, my father asked, "Do you ever hear from Tony?" — last name not required — but I never did, because I wound up making different choices than the choices Tony embodied, and only once used the number that Tony gave me: when Frank Sinatra died.
Though not a member of the Rat Pack proper, Tony was a member, along with Frank, of something they called "The Face Club of America," a society of Hollywood players who, in the late fifties and early sixties, were pioneers and champions of the pleasures of going down on women. Sinatra loved Tony because Tony, being beautiful, had license not to kiss Frank's ass, which gave Frank license in return, not to kick Tony's, or even threaten it. Tony even got away with calling Frank "Francis," and when he spoke to me the morning after Frank's discordantly quiet death, this is what he said: "Francis was misunderstood, Tom. He was known as a cruel man, and he was, he was — he was one of the cruelest men I've ever known. But that's only because he was small, Tom. He was a little guy. He was cruel because he had to keep the motherfuckers away. Do you know about the motherfuckers, Tom?"
"Yes, Tony, I think I do," and I've always tried since then not to be one of them, though I never called him again, and he's gone now, along with Francis, along with my Dad, along with that whole generation of beautiful barbarians. And yet I still own some of the things he gave me: a signed print of his artwork; a restaurant napkin scrawled with the almost Gnostic design of a hand pinching an entire little world between its thumb and forefinger; a marble — a shooter — that he'd preserved from his youth; and a tape recording of the answering machine message he left me the day the story was published. The article was loving and brutal in equal measure, as unflinching in its way as Tony was in his, as merciless as Billy Wilder sitting in his throne at Spago. I'd been afraid of what Tony was going to say, and now he said it: "Tom — I read that story you wrote about me. How ... kind of you." And that was it. I'd told the truth, and that was all this American fantasist ever asked. The voice, though, was strangely reminiscent of the voice he used in Some Like It Hot, and when I first heard the message I thought it was someone trying to sound like Cary Grant. But no: It was Tony Curtis, and even at this late stage of the game he was only trying to sound like himself.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário