Even Elvis wanted to be like Tony Curtis. But, for that matter; almost every man in the fifties and sixties wanted to be Tony Curtis - including Tony Curtis himself. What nobody knew was that, all the while, Bernie Schwartz of the Bronx was keeping just a step ahead of the crowd, trying to invent Tony Curtis for himself. From his boyhood in the depression-era New York streets - back when he was a fast-footed, quick-witted kid, the son of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants - through forty years as an eminent screen idol, Tony Curtis's story is a skeptic's trip through the Elysian fields of stardom.
Tony Curtis: The Autobiography pulls no punches: Curtis debunks myths of stardom and glamour with a raw, uncensored, street-honed New York bite. The scope of his memoirs includes: rooming with Marlon Brando in Hollywood in the late forties; a glamorous marriage to Janet Leigh in 1951, and the extraordinary days during his first flush of success; his co-billed star role in The Defiant One with Sidney Poitier, the first time a black actor received such attention; his social involvement with Frank Sinatra's "Rat Pack"; the making of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (including details of the legendary bath scene with Laurence Olivier); a fully detailed description of his descent into alcohol and cocaine addiction in the 1970s and 1980s; and his therapeutic, ongoing work as a visual artist, drawing his inspiration from Matisse and Joseph Cornell. Tony Curtis met and worked with all the acting and directing icons of his day and this book is a candid and tantalizing probe inside the classic years of the movie business - both the incredible decadence and the numbing, grinding hard work. Curtis was once undervalued as just a pretty face, but in reality he was a dogged student of film technique; his insights on how actors were trained, used, and often destroyed by elements beyond their control have an obsessive truth-seeking quality to them. Here, too, is the dark side of Hollywood glamour, as embodied by the sad stories of Marilyn Monroe and Sharon Tate - and Curtis's own scrapes with disaster.