By Matthew Gurewitsch

WASHINGTON
    TONY CURTIS'S weight-control strategy, which seems to be working for him, is to avoid cooked foods as much as possible.

    In late August, for several days running, he was following a regimen of oysters for breakfast, oysters for lunch, oysters for dinner. One Sunday at the venerable Old Ebbitt Grill, across 15th Street from the White House, he was tucking into the evening ration of a half-dozen bluepoints (accompanied by a wedge of iceberg drizzled with balsamic vinegar), when a waiter danced up from another station and introduced himself as Kevin.

    "I've always admired your work, Mr. Curtis," Kevin said. "Are you in town for a show?"

    "Yeah," Mr. Curtis said almost bashfully, in the Bronx accent immortalized by lines like "Yonder is the valley of the sun and my father's castle." (Contrary to various inconsistent authorities, Mr. Curtis attributes it to "The Prince Who Was a Thief," 1951.)

    At 77, after more than 100 starring film roles and half a century before the cameras, Mr. Curtis seemed to be basking in the gleam of imaginary klieg lights. The glossy black hair has gray in it now, but thanks to what Mr. Curtis calls "an unexaggerated hair piece," it has turned white for the new show. The big ice-blue eyes can still stop traffic though. Across the table was the former Jill Ann VandenBerg, 32, the statuesque equestrian and American history buff who is his fifth wife and with whom he lives in Las Vegas. For the first time, Mr. Curtis, who has painted all his life, even has an art studio.

    "Starting Tuesday, we're doing this musical of `Some Like It Hot' out at Wolf Trap," Mr. Curtis continued, his baritone a smoky mix of silk and husk.

    The show is his first stab at singing and dancing since the film "So This Is Paris" (1954), which led Gene Kelly to advise him, "Keep fencing." (That was in Mr. Curtis's swashbuckling days.)

    The lone surviving star of the original "Some Like It Hot," Billy Wilder's Hollywood comedy of 1959, Mr. Curtis now has the marquee to himself. He has given up the role of the saxophone player Joe, perhaps the most popular of his career, for that of the eccentric millionaire Osgood Fielding III.

    Wilder's masterpiece has acquired something more than mere classic status since its release; in 2000, the American Film Institute ranked it the funniest American movie ever made. You'll remember the premise: having witnessed the St. Valentine's Day massacre in Prohibition Chicago, two down-on-their-luck musicians (Mr. Curtis and Jack Lemmon), fearing for their lives, dress up as women and run off to Palm Beach with an all-girl band in which Marilyn Monroe plays the ukulele.

    The new version has a book credited to Peter Stone (leaning heavily on the original screenplay, by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond) and songs mostly by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, some recycled from the Broadway adaptation, "Sugar" (1972). The show, directed and choreographed by Dan Siretta, opened in June, as the inaugural attraction at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts in Houston, the new $100 million home of Theater Under the Stars. By August, it had made its leisurely way to the capital's Virginia suburbs and Wolf Trap.

    On Tuesday, the real push begins: four weeks at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, followed by dates in 21 other cities coast to coast. The New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark has the show from Feb. 4 through Feb. 9, and the Shubert Theater in New Haven from March 11 through March 16. (The tour schedule appears on the production's Web site, thehotmusical.info.)

    Mr. Curtis's accumulated stage experience before the new "Some Like It Hot" adds up to less than he will log on this tour. When he was a teenager, he appeared in several plays at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Later, summer stock in the Catskills led to a job in the Yiddish theater in Chicago. "But I don't talk Yiddish!" Mr. Curtis protested. They taught him his few lines phonetically. And because the theater director thought his audience would never believe Mr. Curtis's own name, Bernard Schwartz ("They'll think you're really Italian," he declared), the young actor went on under the name B. White.

    Home from the Navy after World War II, having witnessed the formal surrender of Japan on board the U.S.S. Missouri, Signalman Third Class Schwartz signed up for the now legendary dramatic workshop at the New School for Social Research led by Erwin Piscator, the influential German émigré director.

    So there he was, among such classmates as Bea Arthur, Elaine Stritch, Harry Belafonte, Walter Matthau and Rod Steiger. In "At Liberty," her Tony Award-winning one-woman show last season, Ms. Stritch recalled being turned down for all the women's roles in Piscator's production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," whereupon she found her niche as Feste, the jester.

    Asked over oysters whether he had been in that play, too, Mr. Curtis suddenly focused in wonder at some face in the middle distance that only he could see.

    "Do I stand there?" he shot back. "I never had a brother." So he played Sebastian. Was Viola, his twin sister, someone whose name posterity would recognize?

    "Nobody I remember, no," Mr. Curtis replied. "Bea Arthur and Elaine Stritch were always playing Hamlet, or Falstaff."

    The first son of an immigrant Jewish tailor from Hungary and his charming but embittered wife, Tony Curtis was born in Manhattan, where he lived behind his father's tailor shop on the East Side, before moving to the Bronx when he was 12. A child of the Depression and the urban jungle, he was no angel. In love with his libido, he lived by his wits, punching hard, running like a cheetah and always wanting to be in the movies.

    But that's just reality. As far as the world is concerned, Tony Curtis is a creature of pure celluloid, having sprung to life one day in 1949 when Universal Studios started getting mail about that new, unbilled contract player who in perhaps two minutes on screen had danced Yvonne De Carlo into the arms of Burt Lancaster in "Criss Cross."

    As Mr. Curtis would be the first to tell you, his looks, enhanced by his natural talent as an athlete, were the cornerstone of his career. His screen history, early and late, includes enormous amounts of schlock, for which he does not apologize. He worked to pay the bills, and with four ex-wives (the first was Janet Leigh) and six children (among them Jamie Lee Curtis), there were plenty of bills to pay. Family life seems not to have been Mr. Curtis's forte. The references to his wives in his blisteringly frank 1993 memoir, "Tony Curtis: The Autobiography" (William Morrow), written with Barry Paris, range from chivalrous (for Ms. Leigh) to scathing (he refers to his fourth wife as "what's her name"). He loved his children, but mostly from a distance, and the loss of a son, Nicholas, to drugs was traumatic. Mr. Curtis had had periods of drug dependency, too.

    Still, his credits include respectable entries in many genres, from "Trapeze" (1956) and "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) to "Spartacus" (1960) and his own favorite, "The Boston Strangler" (1968), in which, defying stereotype, he played the title role. The convict drama "The Defiant Ones" (1958), in which he starred with Sidney Poitier, won Mr. Curtis his only Oscar nomination.

    But for the most part, his career has been one to which critics and others have long felt entitled to condescend. As far as Mr. Curtis was concerned, the Method was the exclusive property of Marlon Brando. Over time, from many sources, he developed a method of his own. Laurence Olivier taught him that clothes make the man. Cary Grant filled his head with the ideal of an art so artful that it is artless. Alexander Mackendrick, the director of "Sweet Smell of Success," said to pick up the tempo. David Sharpe, his stunt double, said: "Don't walk if you can run. Don't run if you can fly."

    Earlier in the evening, still at the bar, Mr. Curtis had observed: "Some stars like a lot of hoopla when they arrive. I like to steal in quietly before anybody knows I'm there. I like the way people light up when they're surprised. It makes me glad." That jolt of reciprocal delight, for an audience of 2,500, occurred the following Tuesday at Wolf Trap, about an hour into the opening night of "Some Like It Hot." Abracadabra, at center stage, impeccable in a tux, champagne flute in hand, stood Tony Curtis. Riding the wave, he went straight into "November Song" — "We cannot hope for youth or for a crown of curls/ But naughty old men need naughty young girls!" — as other naughty young men, the kids in the chorus line (most probably not yet half Mr. Curtis's age) sang along from rocking chairs.

    As Osgood, the millionaire, Mr. Curtis is portraying an aging playboy on the rebound from his latest divorce and smitten with the ditsy Daphne, a lady bass player. Daphne is in reality Jerry, on the run from the mob. But who cares? As Osgood remarks in the final line of the screenplay, "Nobody's perfect."

    Back when Lemmon was Daphne and Monroe was strumming her ukulele as Sugar Kane, the gold digger with cotton candy for brains and a marshmallow for a heart, Mr. Curtis was Sugar's love interest: Joe, alias Josephine, alias Junior, world-weary heir of Shell Oil. The Osgood of the movie was Joe E. Brown, a supporting player billed sixth in the credits, his face flat as a pancake, lips a pencil line of deadpan merriment.

    No disrespect to colleagues of 2002, but Mr. Curtis's performance is definitely the main event. He's lighter than air. Cary Grant would be proud.

    Later, mixing with the cast at the bar of the local Hilton, Mr. Curtis was still beaming. What about that enigmatic curtain line? Out front, it looked as if Osgood already knew.

    "I think Osgood has had so many affairs with beautiful women, he's happy to have this spiky person who fights back and walks all over him," Mr. Curtis replied. "Maybe he's relieved to have found companionship. `Nobody's perfect.' It's a way for Osgood to say, `Just be my friend.' "

    I take a deep breath. "Tony," I ask. (You can't not call him Tony.) "Your name is above the title. With the bows, you're onstage 18 minutes. How can the star of the show be onstage only 18 minutes?"

    The blue eyes gleam. "That's enough for me. It's not supposed to be heavy lifting. It's supposed to be fun."