Memory of a Super-crush

Tony Curtis died yesterday. A couple of days ago I read a review of Jamie Lee Curtis [his daughter with Janet Leigh] in a new movie and, as before, saw bits of both father and mother in her face. I passed beyond the cowboy age when I loved Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the evening I saw Prince of Bagdad, one of Tony Curtis's first movies. Perhaps I was 11 or 12. Of course it was a romantic swashbuckler, absolutely perfect for my age and utterly exotic to a Midwestern farm girl. "Tall, dark and handsome" was a formula back then and he WAS! Perfect, absolutely perfect.

I never met a man near my own age -- I mean NEVER -- who had that physical perfection. Of course I grew up and began to understand other actors were wonderful in their ways but I had to get much older before I was enthralled by either Jimmy Dean or Marlon Brando. My access to movies was far more limited than that of urban girls, I did not see most of Curtis's movies, but during that most impressionable period I could and did collect the movie magazines and gazed at his photographs. So long ago ...