Tony Curtis paints his own portrait

Los Angeles, Oct 26: Tony Curtis spends much of his time painting on blown-up versions of a profile photo of the actor as a young man.

In that picture, Curtis has his famous thick head of curly black hair slicked just right and stares ahead innocently, an up-and-coming movie star seeing a limitless future. Curtis, now 83, has retouched that picture several different ways. "I embellish them, I keep making more of them," said Curtis, his head now bald, his once-pristine body deteriorated by age and illness but his famous, gravelly New Yorker voice still forcefully intact. "I want to find another quality about me that`s in there somewhere." That may also explain why Curtis wrote "American Prince," a new memoir of a legendary film career. It`s a sex-soaked tome replete with fond recollections of his friendships with the famous and powerful and punctuated, too, by harsh words for a list of Hollywood legends who he says did him wrong. "What you have is what my life was like," Curtis told AFP. "What was I going to do? Clean it up? Make everybody happy and gay?" He certainly doesn`t do that. Curtis describes in the book his poverty-stricken upbringing in the home of a physically abusive mother and an impassive father, the misdeeds that resulted in the destruction of five marriages and estrangements from his children, the untimely deaths of his younger brother and his youngest son, the traumatic decline of his movie career and his descent into cocaine addiction. He`s been married to his current spouse Jill -- his sixth wife -- since 1998. With only bit roles in films and TV shows offered to him these days, he spends much of his time helping her with her wild-horse refuge and painting in the studio. The veteran of more than 120 films is an accomplished painter with work in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For "American Prince," Curtis spares few intimate details about his years as a Hollywood lothario, including his teenage affair with a red-headed, pony-tailed Marilyn Monroe, his sexual dalliances with Yvonne DeCarlo, Natalie Wood and more than a few Playboy bunnies. In a recent interview, he acknowledged he may have been addicted to sex. "I realized if I could mount a girl -- and that sounds very cruel and very bestial but examine it for what it is -- a woman has accepted me," Curtis said. "The main force in me was to be accepted by others. Not education, not money in my pocket, nothing except to be accepted by a girl." Curtis, who dispensed of his given name, Bernard Schwartz, partly in response to Hollywood anti-Semitism, enjoyed fast success as a matinee idol known for "Some Like It Hot," "The Outsider," "Sweet Smell of Success" and "Spartacus." He received his only Oscar nomination for the 1958 film "The Defiant Ones" in which he and Sidney Poitier play prison inmates who break out and spend most of the story chained together by handcuffs. Curtis insisted his black co-star receive double billing with him, a racial breakthrough at the time. "I just thought it was unfair for him to be a featured player when it was a picture of a black and a white," Curtis said. "I was offended by that. I said, I won`t do the movie unless you give him top billing with me.` Second position, of course." The book offers fond words for Poitier and others, but it also skewers many. In an interview, Curtis stood by his accounts, referring to Jerry Lewis as "cruel," Shelley Winters as "very obnoxious," Danny Kaye as "a vicious man" and Yul Brynner as "a pompous prick." Neil Simon, with whom he clashed as the original -- but short-lived -- lead of the Simon play "You Oughta Be In Pictures" was "not the man I thought he would be." "It`s not like I wanted to get even," he said of the book. "I just wanted to be treated like anybody else. There was a lot of opposition to me during the early years of movies. It had an effect on me." Indeed, Curtis believes he was denied meaty roles that went to contemporaries Marlon Brando and Paul Newman. Unlike those actors, he failed to make the transition into mature roles as he aged. "I don`t feel like I got the movies I should`ve gotten," Curtis said. "I felt I deserved more than that the industry had given me. "I felt I should have been considered more, with a little more respect from the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy. I don`t feel like I contributed what I wanted to contribute in the movies." Curtis is frank about his regrets, about his deficiencies as a father and husband. One of his daughters is the actress Jamie Lee Curtis, with whom he admits he isn`t close but said he talks to occasionally about movies. Yet he still thinks there`s time to do better. He hopes to write a screenplay, publish a book of poetry and maybe do some more acting. He has a bit role as a family friend in the recently released Israeli film "David & Fatima" about a Jew romantically involved with a Palestinian woman. "I`m just wondering how many more years I have," he said. "I don`t have 20. I don`t have 15. How many years do I have? I don`t know, but I plan to reinvent myself as an 84-year-old, as an 85-year-old man who can do anything and everything." Bureau Report