It’s time for another edition of Essay Club.
The rules are simple: We all read the same essay before Tuesday 14th May, and meet up in the comments of that day’s ‘sletter. We’ll have a chat together there. The last affair was a relatively low-key run-out, but a good example of what could be.
This month it’s Tom Junod’s purple, pungent profile of Tony Curtis — “The Last Swinger” from the April 1996 edition of GQ. It’s got so many elements that shouldn’t work: from the ring-a-ding-ding tone of voice to the fact it is about, in Junod’s own words, “the definition of a has-been.”
Curtis, the writer told Esquire 14 years later, “had gone from iconic leading man to a kind of spectacularly turned-out hanger-on, flagrantly bewigged and ultimately reduced in scale by the platinum-haired giantess he’d chosen to accompany him through his Hollywood haunts.”
That was, of course, the exact reason to write about him. The man had stamina.
“I lied when I told my editor that I wanted to write about Tony Curtis because he was 70 and still getting laid,” said Junod. “In truth — the kind of truth you don't tell your editors when you're pitching a story — I was trying to figure out the kind of life I wanted to lead at the time, trying to figure out the decisions that I had to make, trying to figure out the legacy I wanted to follow. I was casting about for a father figure. Oh, sure, I had a father, but my father wanted to be Frank Sinatra or Tony Curtis, in no particular order, and on some days thought he was…
“Tony told me the only time we met after the story was published, [that there was] ‘always something there between you and me, from the start’ — some fellow feeling, some willingness to lead and be led, and of all the famous people I've ever spent time with, Tony was one of the very few who let me know that I could call him, anytime, and he would be happy to hear from me.
“Until the day he died,” Junod adds, “my father asked, ‘Do you ever hear from Tony?’ — last name not required — but I never did, because I wound up making different choices than the choices Tony embodied, and only once used the number that Tony gave me: when Frank Sinatra died.”
It’s one of those stories you read and cringe — the awkward Hollywood set pieces, the That’s showbiz, bay-bee vernacular, the wish you had the bottle to go so out on a limb yourself, as writer or as subject matter, to live so fully, fruitfully, and fruitily. When I first read the piece it hit me like two Negronis to an empty stomach.
The piece keeps you close to its bosom. It plays with your hair. You are ensconced in its little world. Away from magazine journalism or journalism at all, away from the notion of “having a real job” and into the world of Tony Curtis — warm, flawed, embarrassing, enigmatic, empathetic, pathetic, desperate, suave, sexy, shallow, and yet somehow — somehow — deep, meaningful.
To be honest, there’s no better way to sell it than with its opener:
So there’s this tree outside Spago, the restaurant in Los Angeles where Tony Curtis eats almost every night of the week. It’s a lemon tree, or a lime tree, something like that, with dark, shiny leaves and a peppery smell that softens the shrill air off Sunset, and it’s so beautiful that when I walked underneath it, my hand jumped automatically into its branches and clutched a hard green ball of fruit. I had just finished my first meal with Tony, and he was walking behind me with his girlfriend, Jill Vanden Berg, this strapping 25-year-old triumph of a blonde whom he had addressed, back in the restaurant, as “you goddess of love, you twin tower of desire, you two tons of vanilla ice cream, you.” Jill was having some trouble navigating the inclined sidewalk in the five-inch spike heels that made her roughly the size of a power forward, so I didn’t think Tony was watching me, but the second my fingers closed around that piece of fruit, and I mean the very second, I heard his voice, and it said, “Take it.”
The next 7,000 words whisks you from there.
See you on the 14th. (And next week, when I bring back 10 Things.)
Take it.