It was while filming Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot in 1958 that Tony Curtis made his infamous remark that shooting a love scene with co-star Marilyn Monroe was "like kissing Hitler". But in a new memoir, Curtis alleges that the two actors were lovers at the time, and that their affair resulted in Monroe's pregnancy – although she later suffered a miscarriage.
In The Making of Some Like It Hot, which is due for publication in the US in September, Curtis, now 84, alleges that the couple, who enjoyed a brief relationship in 1949, grew close again while on set. "What I experienced with her was unforgettable," he says.
Both were married at the time, he to Janet Leigh and she to the playwright Arthur Miller. It was, Curtis says, when they were admitting their affair to Miller that Monroe broke the news of her pregnancy. "I was stunned," Curtis writes. "I just stood there. The room was so silent that I could hear tyres screeching on Santa Monica Boulevard." Curtis says he was told to finish the film and stay away from Miller and Monroe, and it was only after filming had finished that he learned of Monroe's miscarriage.
Curtis's marriage to Janet Leigh, with whom he had two daughters, ended in 1962. He is currently on his fourth marriage. In 2002, Curtis told gay magazine Attitude that when he first arrived in Hollywood in 1948, "I had more action than Mount Vesuvius; men, women, animals!"
At a Guardian interview at BFI Southbank last year, Curtis explained the genesis of the "kissing Hitler" remark. "Someone said to me, 'Hey, what's it like kissing Marilyn?' I said, 'It's like kissing Hitler. What are you doing asking me such a stupid question?' That's where it came from," he said.
Monroe and Miller's marriage, begun in 1956, was dissolved in 1961, a year before the actor's death.
