Tony curtis children

I read Janet Leigh’s autobiography, and I got her “take” on her eleven-year marriage to Tony Curtis. I thought it would be interesting to hear what he had to say about it, so I went to Tony Curtis: the Autobiography. Written by Tony Curtis with assistance from Barry Paris, the book told me very little about that infamous marriage. In fact, Curtis has almost nothing to say about any of his seven (eight?) marriages. I do have to admit, he does mention Leigh by name sometimes as he tells of some incident, which is more than he does with his other wives. A telling statement when he met some monarch or president or some such: he says he was with whatever wife he was with at the time. And that is telling to me for I found Curtis to be arrogant and self-centered. Yes, according to the “asides” written by Paris, which flesh out the stories Curtis tells, Tony Curtis was beloved by almost everybody. But I don’t buy it. Autobiographies are notorious for being personal accounts that either knowingly or unknowingly embellish stories, invent stories, and sometimes lie in telling stories. Curtis wants us to believe he was a good father, and yet his famous daughter Jamie Lee Curtis says she didn’t really know her dad until she was older and no longer needed him. At that point, she says, she got to know him and thought he was a good man. And I believe that could be true, for we all change as we age. Curtis made over a hundred movies, and he tells of the major ones, but his anecdotes are just that. In order to know about the movies themselves, it is Paris who tells of them. Curtis eventually became an accomplished artist, a painter and a maker of boxes (sort of shadowboxes) and won acclaim for his art. That acclaim and the joy he found in dedicating himself to art seemed to be a mellowing factor because he was much happier as an artist than as an actor. But the bulk of this book focuses on Curtis’s opinions about the movie industry (not great) and how wonderful he was as an actor (as revealed by him.) To his credit, his acting was acclaimed. He was a legend of old Hollywood, albeit the generation of Rock Hudson rather than Clark Gable, and it was enlightening and somewhat enjoyable to read his journey. I have to admit I enjoyed Janet Leigh’s autobiography more, but even she seemed to paint herself as a “goody-two-shoes.” If we can believe Tony Curtis’s accounts of his sexual appetite, I think Leigh was holding back some. But, then again, Curtis claims he was continually having affairs, so maybe Leigh wasn’t fulfilling his needs. Who cares, really? I, for one, didn’t, to the point that I really didn’t need to read his diatribes about his sexual escapades. Nor did I like that he refused—and this was the 1990s, long after “gay liberation”—to use the word gay. He talked of how he loved his homosexual friends (but don’t even think that he, himself, had any of those tendencies) and, to my disgust, often he replaced the word homosexual with the offending “f” word for gay men. As a gay man myself, I was not happy to see this man who professed to be an icon and beloved being so offensive. The time in which he wrote this account was long after he should have developed using the less offensive terms.