Tony Curtis still stuck with line he disowns

Press, 25 January 1986, Page 7

Tony Curtis still stuck with line he disowns

By 808 WISEHART, of Newhouse News Service NZPA-AAP Los Angeles Tony Curtis wants to set the record straight: Just as Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca, Curtis denies that he ever uttered the immortal line, “Yondah lies dah castle o’ my faddah.”

Too late. The former Bernard Schwartz is forever stuck with the tiny but humiliating piece of movie lore that has dogged his tracks for more than 30 years.

Curtis blames it all on Debbie Reynolds, who he says invented a joke on his thick Bronx accent based on a line in “The Black Shield of Falworth,” one of several swashbucklers he made grinding out films like sausage links in the late 1940 s and early 19505. When Curtis dismisses Reynolds as a “cruel and miserable woman,” it’s hard to tell if he’s kidding. “Right after the movie, she said: ‘Did you hear Tony say, ‘Yondah lies me foddah’s castle?’ or ‘Here comes me faddah’s castle down the yondah’ — whatever she said. I could have rapped her right in the ..

Those seven little words are more popular than the movie ever was, and Curtis admits he is bewildered at the story’s staying power.

In spite of 141 films, several of them good —

“The Defiant Ones,” “Trapeze,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The Vikings,” “Spartacus,” and "The Boston Strangler” — Curtis never shook his reputation as the archtypical Hollywood creation, a high school dropout who joined the Navy at 16 and thanks to his good looks, new name and incredible luck had a lot more success than his paucity of talent deserved. “I still don’t understand what’s so funny,” he says. “Is that ethnic humour? A joke about Jews? About New York? A Polish joke? I mean, spare me.”

It was a long road from “The Black Shield of Falworth” to “Mafia Princess.” Curtis plays a Chicago mobster, Sam Giancana, and Susan Lucci of “All My Children” is Giancana’s daughter, Antoinette, on whose book about growing up in a Mafioso’s family the movie is based.

A trim and energetic 60, wearing a doublebreasted dark blue suit, a small pearl in one lapel and a flowing black scarftie, Curtis is dapper in the style of a flamboyant undertaker.

His hair is iron-gray and his still-handsome face shows the lines, knobs and wrinkles of his legendary hard living.

But Curtis’s swashbuckling is well behind him now. These days, he is best known as Jamie Lee

Curtis’s father. Ironically, Curtis met her mother, the actress Janet Leigh, on the “Falworth” set as his co-star. That movie just won’t go away. Also behind him is a three-year struggle with alcohol and cocaine addiction that crept up on the actor bit by bit and year by year. It ended, he says proudly, 15 months ago.

Though his addictions practically sank his career, Curtis finally banked the fires of his old intensity when he decided there is not much in life worth taking seriously. He finds something to laugh about even in the recovery process itself, especially his aborted stay at the Betty Ford clinic, the fashionable addictionrecovery facility that has housed Mary Tyler Moore

and Elizabeth Taylor, among others. “I go to the Betty Ford Centre, which is for alcoholic and drug addition, and everybody’s smoking cigarettes,” he says, rolling his eyes to the heavens. “I mean, I’m dying from lung cancer and they’re curing me of my addiction to cocaine? I gotta give up one disease to catch another? Forget it” Even at his nadir, Curtis still worked “maybe every four or five months,” but in nothing of consequence.

“When I’d go to work I wouldn’t be drunk, but it would be distracting,” he says. “Suppose you’re having a fight with somebody you love and you’re driving a car and you’re distracted. If that distracts you enough, you ram that car into somebody or someone. So when I was working, I’d be saying: ‘Geez, I can’t wait to get a shot of whisky.’ Or maybe, ‘I can’t wait to get a line of cocaine.’ I couldn’t wait to do something to kind of relax me.

“Marilyn Monroe had a line when we worked together in ‘Some Like It Hot’ and I didn’t realise then how prophetic it was until lately. In a scene on the train she had a flask and she held it up and said, ‘I can quit any time I want to, only I don’t want to.’ That’s the greatest Catch 22 I’ve ever heard in my life and it’s absolutely true.”

Curtis credits his six children — four girls and two boys ranging from 12 to 27 — for helping him climb out of the abyss. Of ail his offspring, only Jamie Lee followed him into acting. Curtis says it was not the result of any fatherly advice, because he did not give any. “One day I woke up and picked up a paper and there’s my daughter being advertised in a movie,” he says. “I knew she was interested, but I never presumed to give her any advice. She just arrived at it on her own.”