American Prince: A Memoir by Tony Curtis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It’s difficult to expect truth from autobiographies because the form, in a sense, demands artfulness. We remember things differently from each other and when we remember ourselves and then place that memory under the spotlight of the public eye, we embrace something artful, something conscious and managed and made, even when it’s not intentional, even when we don’t know, we still do it. We still tell the story in the way that we tell it, highlighting what we want to tell and dropping the things that need to remain untold, even to ourselves. All of this is a roundabout way to tell you that American Prince, a memoir by Tony Curtis with the aid of ghost Peter Golenblock, is a rather brilliant thing. It is, even though it is also awfully revealing (I mean, you do want to sit down and go “Tony, my old chum, let’s talk about a double standard” because the concept of somebody feeling cuckolded by a partner’s infidelities while he, himself, is infideliting all over the place and deeply, deeply, comfortable with that).
So why would I rate this as five stars? Because it is unabashedly itself in a period where I think Hollywood was becoming something new, figuring out what it was going to be in a period where it had to change and where the opportunities, I think, were so, so incomprehensibly there. I mean, Burt Lancaster got discovered by being a hottie in an elevator, for heavens sake. Tony Curtis was discovered while still at college (a hottie, a determined young man who was, I think, eternally trying to shake away the memory of who he had been and to try to find something else). There’s some acute, perceptive writing here, particularly of the new generation of stars, of the spectre of Marlon Brando, for example, a brilliance that haunted Curtis and gave him something to chase, it seems, for much of his life.
Curtis is unafraid to recognise who he is. I do not think he realises that many of these points are, shall we say, not particularly laudable things, but I do appreciate how distinct a book this is and strong his identity is within its pages. It’s probably one of the best books about this period that I’ve read because Curtis is here, warts and all, and that’s kind of my impression about this period – it was messy and stubborn and scrappy and horrible and beautiful, and sometimes all of this at the same time. This isn’t to excuse this book for its less than salubrious moments. In many ways, this is a chronicle of Who I Slept With And When I Did It And By The Way One Was Marilyn Monroe and there’s a woman who later gets called the c- word and you think Hmm Is This Because She Did Not Sleep With You? so yes, that’s quite the thing.
But also you get a perspective on one of the greatest periods in Hollywood by an actor who, I think, was too busy trying to prove himself, to work past all of his doubts and insecurities, to realise that he was, in fact, very good and could sometimes be brilliant. In Trapeze, for example, a film I found by mistake, he is electric; in the Vikings, he is the noble hero to a T, and even in The Black Shield of Falworth, where he flirts quite heavily with Being A Bit Wooden, there’s still something deliciously intriguing about his unashamed braggadocio on the screen.
Despite it all, despite his misogynistic ways, despite the moment where he goes to stay in the Playboy Mansion for a bit, despite his double standards, despite his “look, I’ll do anything but don’t touch the hair”, I like him. This is a good book. It doesn’t shy away from any of that and I think, maybe, it might be one of the few memoirs that I’ve read that gives you the character, warts and all on the page. This is Tony Curtis. He’s not really bothered if you like him or not (but he is, he is very much).
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Daisy May Johnson 