Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1954)

( Continued from page 59) the handsome boy and the beautiful girl who found each other through the medium of motion pictures. Marriage, however, was distinctly their own idea. Not even the maestros who make a business of boy getting girl approved of it. From sweet-young-thing roles, Janet Leigh had blossomed into a sexy glamour girl and was being given a tremendous publicity build-up. Anthony Curtis was the rising romantic idol of bobby-soxers everywhere. “There was some opposition from both sides,” Janet recalls. “We were advised it might affect our popularity. But we didn’t get married for anyone but ourselves, and we felt we had a right to — ” Tony’s answer to such warnings was forthright and typical. “If my fans go to see my pictures just because I’m single, then I’m in the wrong business. I might as well find out whether they like to see me as an actor and watch my performance. If my whole career is based on being single — I’d better start painting right now.” So they married in the face of premortems and potential problems which might well have defeated screen writers who specialize in creating conflicts and solving them. Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh came from two different worlds and two different backgrounds. They were of different nationalities with inherently different traits and temperaments. And of different religions — Jewish and Christian Science. Although two years younger, Janet seemed far more mature. Tony was making $400 a week in comparison to Janet’s four-figure salary at M-G-M. Two years behind her in movie-town, he was just on his way up — while Janet Leigh was already an established star. But neither would be discouraged. As Tony says now, “I fell in love with a girl. I didn’t think of a career or schameer. I’d just found a girl I loved, and money didn’t matter at all. I loved her and I wanted to be her husband — ” To those who volunteered that he couldn’t afford to get married, this exSwabbie not too long from the tenements pointed out, “I’m making more money than most young men my age. I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I can afford anything. Besides — we won’t be living it up. We don’t have to impress anybody.” Together, today — three years later — they’ve impressed just about everybody — nationally and internationally. Janet’s popularity soared. Among male stars, Tony zoomed to first place with the fans. Now his salary has just about evened with Janet’s. They’re the most popular, and most publicized, star-couple in current Hollywood history. And as husband and wife, they’ve captured the young-at-heart everywhere — the very young-at-heart who dream enough and believe enough and love enough. . . . “I think I know why they’ve accepted us,” Janet says soberly. “Many think of us as an ideal couple. To them we represent the blond girl and the black-haired boy who meet in every magazine story and live happily afterwards. But if anything should ever happen,” she says, stopping to knock firmly on wood, “we wouldn’t let this make any difference. Marriage, however and wherever, is no storybook affair.” Certainly to them there’s no storybook flavor about their own marriage nor in how they’ve made it work happily and comfortably, three years afterwards. As Janet says sensibly, “People in love work things out — and people not in love find all When Love Is Enough sorts of reasons for not working them out. It never — just happens. And I don’t agree with those who speak of Hollywood marriages as though ‘Hollywood’ is some kind of crutch. This, I think, is just an excuse to duck responsibility for their own failures. Marriage is marriage, anywhere. If you love enough, you can work it out.” On this they were always agreed. For Jeanette Morrison and Bernie Schwartz learned their lessons early in life. You worked for whatever you got. You worked to get it, and you worked to keep it. Despite their differing backgrounds, this, at least, they had in common from the beginning. . . . But although she was also a child of the depression, Jeanette grew up surrounded by the security of a small town, a popular and accepted member of its society. Bernie’s world was that of four thousand human beings jammed into tenements whose junior-league activities involved snitching fruit from pushcarts, scoring bull’s-eyes with ripe tomatoes and dodging officers on the street beat. Jeanette was a brilliant student and ambitious for the future, a leader in college activities and a member of the foremost campus sorority. Bernie’s “fraternity” was the toughest in the tenement. “The Black Hand,” they called themselves. “That is, to others we seemed like a tough mob — but not to us. We went swimming in the East River, we beat up on kids who didn’t belong to our mob and swiped stuff from the dime store.” Two of his “frat brothers” wound up in Sing Sing. “A couple are unemployed, and one is a big hood in New York today.” But as he says now, “I would never have made a criminal. Why? I don’t honestly know why. For one thing, I had the love and understanding of my parents — and that’s important to mold you. But it must have had something to do with the machinery inside me — something that just wouldn’t let me do anything really wrong.” Inside Bernie Schwartz even then was an urge for self-expression. From his father, Mono Schwartz, a former wellknown actor in Hungary, he inherited a flair for acting and a desire for bettering himself. From his mother, Helen Schwartz, both gentleness and strength — and a deep down sense of right and wrong. “I worried— but my Tony — he was a good boy,” his mom says now. As best he could — he made his own music then. He ran a little class of acting down at the settlement house — “to keep the kids out of mischief an hour or two.” He would suggest, “Let’s play a game,” conning them along. “Okay, Bernie — what kind of game?” The “acting game,” he told them. “You, Joe, you’re the cop. Tom, you’re the robber. Bill, you be the detective. And you, Lippy, you will play Chickie for the cops. Now then — let’s go — everybody act!” As a kid, too, Bernie would hang around the stage doors off Broadway, hoping one of the crew would come out, give him ten cents and say, “Here, kid — go buy us some doughnuts and coffee.” Once he delivered coffee to Bert Lahr — “That was a ton of thrills.” But Hell’s Kitchen has no corner on hunger or poverty. There were times when both Jeanette’s father and mother were without work. More than once, her mother’s watch went into the local pawn shop for $15 to pay for music lessons or to buy Jeanette a dress for some special occasion. With the Morrisons it was always share and share alike. “The three of us have always been together. Jeanette knew what we had — or didn’t have. We never fooled her,” her mother says now. “And we had plenty of skimping to do.” Jeanette was flat broke in Hollywood when her mother’s birthday check came — enabling her to buy a $12.95 pink cotton dress trimmed with black rickrack, the “lucky dress” she wore in the interview at M-G-M that got her a contract. Regardless of their different environments, Jeanette Morrison and Bernie Schwartz arrived in Hollywood with much the same basic foundation as human beings. The same basic honesty, sense of truth, willingness to work and simple faith which wouldn’t be denied. When she was fourteen Jeanette worked at Kress’s after school. Later she wrapped packages in a men’s clothing store in Stockton. Her senior year in college she married a fellow-student, Stan Reames, and she cooked for some of the students who boarded with them to help defray expenses. Bernie Schwartz sold newspapers, shined shoes, worked in a broom factory — among other chores. But, however seemingly dark the future, in his heart now and then the music would come through. “I remember thinking even then, riding the subway in the freezing dawn to sell my papers, All this just can’t go down the drain. Some day it will mean something. It’s for some purpose. It won’t all be wasted.” Just how much it would mean, however, he would never have been able to believe at that time. Nor that he would meet and marry a motion-picture star who, from her own experience, could well understand his fervent all-embracing thankfulness. To Hollywood in general — with his uninhibited charm, his refreshing irreverence for protocol, his colorful vernacular and his touching gratefulness towards one and all connected with the new magic life before him — Anthony Curtis was a new and unpredictable kind of pigeon. California was the “Promised Land” in his enthusiastic eyes. “So much sunshine, such open air, so many flowers.” He couldn’t wait to move his mom and dad and brother Bobby out to share his new paradise. He had absolutely no plans, however, for sharing it with anyone else. Janet Leigh had by then dissolved her college marriage to Stan Reames. She was in the process of reorganizing her life, and certainly had no intentions of disorganizing it all over again, when Anthony Curtis bebopped, heart-free, upon the Hollywood scene. To writers bent on keeping the clamoring fans who discovered him informed concerning his matrimonial future, he colorfully envisioned same as a delightfully informal arrangement. “The bride will bring her toothbrush and another footlocker and move in.” But he was, he knew, just making up a story. Then, across a crowded room, his gypsyheart betrayed him. En route with a friend to an early movie, Tony dropped in on a party at Lucey’s restaurant “to meet a few people— and for some of those wonderful little free sandwiches.” And he was enchanted by a lovely vivid girl across the crowd. “When she smiled — the lights went on all over the room.” Although he had no way of knowing it then, Tony was also a source of brilliant illumination. As Janet says quietly now, “Tony gave me confidence when I needed it most. Belief in myself. Faith in doing what I felt I should do. I was going through a big change when I met Tony. I’d learned a great deal in too short a time. I wasn’t secure as a person. I wasn’t sure what I thought was right — or whether I even had the right to think.” Tony’s courtship was thoughtful and typical — and highly effective. Having discovered they had a common interest in the theatre, he promised to let Janet know