By PETRONELLA WYATT

Last updated at 21:06 18 April 2008

Tony Curtis, Hollywood legend and star of the Billy Wilder classic Some Like It Hot, is sitting on a balcony in London giving me a welcoming stare from underneath a Stetson hat.







Curtis - who had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, has been married five times, including to Hitchcock actress Janet Leigh, and, by his estimation, has slept with 1,000 women - attempts an unusual opening gambit.

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Heart-throb: Tony Curtis alongside Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot

Gripping my hand in his gnarled paw, he says: "It's such a relief to be sitting here with you - without feeling sexually aroused."

If Curtis wasn't 82 and recovering from a mild illness, I think I might slap him. "Don't get me wrong," he continues in that famous Bronx drawl, as thick as molasses, "I've been sick for most of my life, in my head.

"This showed itself in a lot of ways. I was insecure about women, so I wanted to go to bed with them all. I was insecure about being a poor Jewish boy (Curtis was born Bernie Schwartz, the son of a Hungarian immigrant tailor). I was insecure that Hollywood never gave me an Oscar."

His eyes, which are periwinkle blue - if a little rheumy - gaze directly into mine. "For the first time in my life, I think I am at ease. I just want to paint. I've painted since I was young and it's my passion." (Harrods is showing an exhibition of his work, which is heavily influenced by the Post-Impressionists.)

Then the man who makes Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg with his mere 30 lovers look like a choirboy, states: "I don't want any woman except my wife, Jill, and for the first time in my life it isn't just lust." Jill Vandenberg, whom he married in 1998, is a 6ft tall, voluptuous blonde 43 years his junior. She is hovering discreetly in the background.

Tony Curtis is a bundle of contradictions. He's a street-fighting boy from the Bronx, yet he hand-kisses like a count in an Austrian operetta. He speaks with candour about his private life, as if he were discussing the merits of smoked salmon versus cucumber sandwiches. "But you see," he explains, "it is only by being candid that I have been able to overcome the awful things in my life."

The dark-haired celluloid Apollo who became such a world-famous heart-throb that even Elvis Presley copied his black quiff, and female fans tore at his clothes, had an unpropitious start in life and has suffered genuine tragedies. He has overcome heroin addiction and the death of his eldest son, Nicholas, at 23, from a drugs overdose.

His remarkable story began in his father Emmanuel's tailor shop in New York. The young Curtis saw little of his impoverished male parent and was maltreated by his mother, Helen, who was a schizophrenic. "She beat me up. Hit me all the time. She didn't dare do that to my father, so it was me she struck. If I didn't finish my soup, she would throw me against the wall. She was crazy."

When Curtis was 12, his nine-year-old brother, Julius, was hit by a truck and he had to identify the body. "It was Hell. She didn't care."

I ask him if he has a sort of warped Oedipus complex. Did it affect his relationships with women, particularly his usually short-lived marriages? "I am Oedipus," he responds. "Of course it ruined my relations with women. I had - what is the word?" After a pause, he finds the correct word: "satyriasis", a compulsion to sleep with everything in a skirt.

He beams. "That's it. I was permanently aroused. Because of my mother, I didn't see women as people with intellects. All I wanted was big breasts and sex. I was trying to prove something. Then again, I was so good-looking."

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Feeling old: 'It's such a relief to be sitting here with you - without feeling sexually aroused,' Curtis told Petronella Wyatt

While telling me about his anxieties, Curtis repeatedly reminds me how good-looking he was. After serving in the Navy in 1945, he was discovered by a New York talent agency and sent to Hollywood.

In 1948, aged 23, he was put under contract by Universal Pictures. "This is because I was the handsomest of all the boys," he confides, attempting an expression of modesty.

"I was resented and hated because I was so good-looking and Jewish. It's true. This is not paranoia." I look questioningly at him. "But Tony, weren't most of the studio heads, like Sam Goldwyn and Louis B Mayer, as well as directors like Billy Wilder, Jewish?"

"That made no difference. You had to pretend not to be. Then because the men found me too much of a competition sexually, they even started rumours I was homosexual. They put me in baggy trousers and made me go naked from the waist up like a girl." It is true. One particularly unsuitable piece of casting was to make him play the role of an English medieval knight in The Black Shield Of Falworth. Critics howled when he came out in sheer Bronxese with: "Yondda lies de cassle of my fuddah."

Film-goers, however, fell for his charms. If his looks and overall "package" were a hindrance to his being taken seriously, he managed to perform some extremely good acting in such films as the Sweet Smell Of Success and Trapeze (both with Burt Lancaster).

"You know something," says Curtis, who is suddenly shedding his insecurities, "I became a really good actor." He complains that the film industry never appreciated him and failed to give him an Oscar, preferring the "method-acting bulls**t".

He has a point. Curtis was able to segue from comedy as light and as perfect as a souffle into the rawest of anguish. When I tell him this he is ecstatic. He dips his Stetson in gratitude, showing a completely bald pate.

"I'm not wearing my toupee at the moment. Can't be bothered," he grins. "But I'm glad you appreciate me. I was more than just a guy who had two girls a day."

In 1951, Curtis married Janet Leigh. "She had a magnificent bosom," he muses. Although he says "women usually treated me badly", I point out that he could not have been an ideal husband. "Janet was unfaithful to me," he says. I venture he must have chased other women.

"Yes, I did," he replies in an off-hand way. "But only when, as with Janet, I couldn't take the lunacy at home any more."

And he claims that the prim Leigh, "who didn't really appreciate sex", tried to "turn me into her idea of a gentleman. She found me crude and clumsy, and then she went mad".

He then tells me a story astonishing for its frankness. One night, he was watching her sit at her dressing table. She had a bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. "She took all 14 pills out and started popping them in her mouth. I hit her really hard on the back so they all flew out of her. Then I knew the marriage was over."

The couple had a daughter, the actress Jamie Lee Curtis. Curtis concedes in a melancholy way that he was a neglectful father. "I feel Jamie doesn't love me, maybe because I couldn't stand to be around the house any more."

After leaving Leigh, he married the German starlet Christine Kaufmann in 1963. It lasted three years. "She was anti-Semitic. I worry about that. I think that because of the Iraq war, anti-Semitism is on the increase again." He pauses. "But I don't get involved in politics."

He then wed Leslie Allen, a model, before absconding with a teacher, Lisa Deutsch (they divorced in 1994). Then tragedy struck when Nicholas, his son by Allen, died of a heroin overdose.

"You never get over that," he mumbles. "The death of a child. No. Can't talk about it." He squeezes my hand as if seeking silent reassurance.

Curtis had been dabbling with drugs himself. In 1973, he was busted for marijuana possession and then went on to harder narcotics, as his film career faded. "I could have killed myself," he recalls.

He went to the Betty Ford Centre and then took whatever film parts were available, consoling himself by painting. (His pictures fetch up to £8,000 a canvas.)

He had much to console himself about. He played roles in farces as Tarzan In Manhattan and Lobster Man From Mars. "Did you play the lobster or the man?" I ask. He grins.

"Yeah, they were pretty bad. But in those days, before Jill and full-time painting, I wanted to act - in anything. I look back at the great films I did and am happy with that."

Curtis will always be associated most with the cross-dressing Billy Wilder masterpiece Some Like It Hot, which co-starred Marilyn Monroe. After filming that, he said, on being asked what it was like to kiss Monroe: "It was like kissing Hitler." This sentence has become part of movie lore.

Today, he says: "I said it as a joke. I mean, it was such a darn stupid question, so I gave a stupid answer."

Monroe and Curtis also had a history. When they were both struggling in Hollywood in the early Fifties, the two became lovers. Their brief liaison is described by Curtis with unabashed detail.

"She found it hard to reach orgasm. We were both inexperienced, 22 or something. It was a messy business." When they worked on Some Like It Hot, he says she had "gone funny. Her mind was all over the place. She had lost confidence".

In one scene, Curtis and Monroe romance each other on the sofa of a yacht. "It was awful," he says. "She nearly choked me to death by deliberately sticking her tongue down my throat into my windpipe."

In the film, Curtis parodied the voice of his idol and friend Cary Grant, while pretending to be an eligible millionaire. It was a brilliant piece of acting. "I was really proud of that," he says.

"They are all dead now. Cary, Jack Lemmon, Sinatra, all my Hollywood friends. Sometimes I feel so lonely."

Today, he lives with Jill, who rescues horses, in Las Vegas, disdaining modern Hollywood and its "so-called stars".

"Actors today achieve nothing," he sighs. "Nor do they have any glamour. They seem more interested in adopting babies than films. All the films are terrible, too, because the scripts are so bad and there are no decent film-makers. So I stick to Jill and my paintings."

Curtis met Jill in a restaurant. She has short blonde hair and a very generous figure. "But this time it's not about her body," Curtis tells me. "It's about talking, communicating."

So the two-girl-a-day man has lost all interest in the hurly-burly of the chaise longue? "If the urge comes, it comes. But you know, it's a relief that it doesn't bother me any more. I finally feel free. Sitting here now, I am so content."

The last heartthrob from Hollywood's Golden Age smiles and borrows a line from Sunset Boulevard: "And when my time comes, I'm ready for my close-up, Mr De Mille."