Bernard Schwartz RIP
also known as Josephine
Every New York kid who's grown up struggling on the hard side of the street has the dream: Someday I'm gonna bust outta here and make it big.
Bernie Schwartz is the kid who did.
He's the Jewish kid from the Bronx who, until he was 6, only spoke Hungarian. When he was 8, his mother put him and his brother Julius in an orphanage because she couldn’t afford to feed them.
That didn't kill the dream. Maybe it fed the dream. However it worked, Bernie Schwartz grew up to become Tony Curtis, a chiseled Hollywood hunk who lived the good life.
He married a movie star, Janet Leigh, and he became as big as she was, a magnet for teenage hormones who also learned to hold his own with Burt Lancaster, Sidney Poitier, Kirk Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe.
That's making it, my friend, and while Tony Curtis in later years could come off as high-strung and even mildly eccentric, he knew he was living the dream and he appreciated every minute of it.
That was clear on the screen, whether he was sweating with the slaves in "Spartacus" or adjusting his dress in "Some Like It Hot," and it was clear in person.
He had come far enough, he reflected, that he could look back on his early years with a kind of benevolent nostalgia.
He remembered stickball and street games, he said, not the fact that his father Emanuel, a struggling immigrant tailor, never made enough money to fulfill more basic American dreams like putting food on the table.
There were three boys in the Schwartz family – Bernie, Julius and Robert, who inherited his mother's illness. It was the Depression, which helped nobody, and Tony Curtis recalled how Bernie Schwartz thought about escaping from the tension at home by joining another family, a street gang.
By pure chance he was redirected, he said, right around the time Emanuel Schwartz was struck and killed by a truck.
Bernie was the only functional member of the family that day, so he had to identify the body.
Tony Curtis talked about all this as drama with a happy ending. At the time, he had a more visceral and common reaction: He took the first chance he saw to get out.
As soon as he was old enough, he joined the Navy, which he had seen ennobled in the movies by Cary Grant, his favorite actor.
When World War II ended, he came back to New York and signed up for acting lessons, figuring that was his quickest ticket to money and girls.
He did some Off-Broadway, got noticed and by 1948 headed for Hollywood, where his accent was considered a cute accessory to his Greek god look.
A fair number of dreamers get that far and then hit the wall. Not Bernie. He took it to the top.
Bernie Schwartz's dream may differ a little in the details from those of the people who walk his old streets today.
The movie dream maybe today is more a TV dream. The music dream that was songwriting for Berlin and Gershwin today might be rap. Basketball is on the list.
But in the larger sense, it's the same dream. "Whether you're Irish, Italian, Dominican or Puerto Rican," said Tony Curtis, "they're still the same streets."
Read more:
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local..._lived_the_hollywood_dream.html#ixzz113P9b6yP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k812fxnpLAM
