San Francisco Chronicle
Octavio Roca,
SF Chronicle Dance Critic

    Life is good for Tony Curtis. That at 77 he is having a ball making his musical stage debut is just a detail among many.

    He has made 122 movies and is now in the middle of a national tour with the musical "Some Like It Hot." He opens next week at the Golden Gate Theatre, more than four decades after starring in Billy Wilder's classic screen comedy. Wilder, a mentor to Curtis, is now gone. So are his "Some Like It Hot" co- stars Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe, as well as George Raft and Pat O'Brien. Curtis is still here.

    "And I'm fine," he says. "I'm great. Look, I have a wonderful personal life, my children are all grown, I have a couple of grandchildren. I'm a painter, and I love that too. Now I'm out on the road and seeing all these people and having them see I'm on my feet and all right."

    Right on cue, a pair of fans wave shyly and he calls out, "Hello, darling!" to them. They are thrilled, and they will not be the first to seek him out as Curtis finishes a photo session before settling down for a conversation about his life, his movie legacy and his budding life onstage.

    "It's neat, isn't it?" he beams.

    "When I come across a 50-, 60-year-old woman and she looks at me like that and she blushes, she's like a little girl again. It's wonderful," he says. "Besides, I like the idea that I'm working. I could be home, watching TV. Instead, what an opportunity at my age, to be top-billed in a musical and get to sing and dance -- they put in an extra song for me, you know? And I'm making lots of money and having a good time."

    In the show coming to San Francisco, Curtis no longer plays his screen role of a young jazz musician on the lam in drag. He now takes the part played by Joe E. Brown onscreen in the 1959 picture and by Cyril Ritchard onstage in the original 1972 version of the musical, called "Sugar." "Yes, now I play the eccentric, very handsome millionaire," says Curtis. "And I get the great punch line: 'Nobody's perfect.'

    "Maybe next I should play Sugar?"

    His Bronx accent is improbably thicker than in the movies, and his manner is unassuming. When Curtis says, and he says it often, that "I've always been the handsomest of men," it is not a case of a man's vanity but of an actor's clear-eyed objectivity. Onscreen, Curtis has played the object of everyone's lust from Natalie Wood to Sir Laurence Olivier, and it is easy even now to understand the attraction: His smile is a killer, his eyes are intense and his charm is undiminished by time.

    "That was the way it was for me, I got in the movies because of my looks," he says. "But I was lucky. I never had to kiss anybody. I never had to kiss anything. I just went into it wholeheartedly and made it.

    "You look at poor Marilyn, such a sweet girl. When she got to Hollywood she had to wear knee pads for the first few years. For me, it wasn't like that."

    Born Bernard Schwartz in 1925, Curtis grew up in New York and joined the Navy in World War II. After service, "I was able to use the GI Bill of Rights to study, so I went to the New School of Social Research," he says. "Piscator's school. It was wonderful."

    Curtis is modest about his schooling, but his acting training was more solid than he admits, and his stage work in New York was promising. He was discovered by the movies while still in school: "A woman named Joyce Selznick found me, brought me out to Hollywood, and I got my first lead right away.

    "I know I didn't get in because I was an actor. I had on-the-job training. They didn't know that out in Hollywood, or they didn't care. But I knew it. I learned from the directors."

    He learned a lot. Like his late friend Cary Grant, whom he can still imitate with hilarious precision, Curtis was so at home onscreen that many have assumed he was doing nothing. "That's how it should be," says Curtis. "That's the whole purpose of the exercise of acting. The minute you start seeing technique onscreen, you're dead."

    The directors Curtis credits as major influences in his development as an actor add up to an honor roll of Hollywood history: Wilder, Vincente Minnelli, Carol Reed, Stanley Kramer, Blake Edwards, Nicolas Roeg, Stanley Kubrick.

    "I had a great time with Kubrick when we made 'Spartacus,' " recalls Curtis.

    "Kirk Douglas was 44, so all the gladiators had to be in their 40s; that's why everybody looked so old in the picture. I was 30 when I played Antoninus the slave, and I think Kubrick was 31, maybe 32. So we hung out together a lot. He was brilliant."

    A few of Curtis' pictures were strictly what he calls "child support payments," but his oeuvre is nevertheless impressive and includes among his own favorites "The Sweet Smell of Success," "Trapeze," "The Defiant Ones," "Spartacus," "Operation Petticoat," "Kings Go Forth," "The Boston Strangler," "Houdini" and "The Great Race."

    "Some Like It Hot," close to Curtis' heart, was singled out by the American Film Institute as the greatest film comedy ever made.

    "Ain't it neat?" says Curtis with pride.

    Curtis has been married five times and is "completely happy" with his wife of four years, Jill Ann Vandenberg. The couple live in Las Vegas, "a most amusing place," he says. Casino chips from Bellagio fall out of Curtis' wallet when he pulls it out to tip a waitress. "You can see I really come from Vegas, " he laughs.

    "It doesn't get any better, really," he says before leaning over and whispering. "There's no such thing as old -- it's all in the spirit you have.

    "Since I married Jillie, some friends still ask me, 'Tony, you're 77, isn't it dangerous to make love to a 32-year-old woman?' You know what I tell them?"

    Curtis pauses, knowingly, bats his lashes over his big blue eyes and flashes the smile that conquered Hollywood. Then, deadpan, this:

    "If she dies, she dies."

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THEATER
SOME LIKE IT HOT: Tony Curtis stars in this revised version of ""Sugar,'' directed and choreographed by Dan Siretta, with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill and book by Peter Stone. Oct. 8-Nov. 3 at the Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St., San Francisco. Tickets: $34-$77. Call (415) 512-7770