“A producer I know couldn’t wear them, so he gave them to me. They pinch a little, but aren’t they beautiful? They cost him $75.”
Clifton wandered over to add a word of praise for the suit. “But you can’t wear that tie with it.”
“What kind should I wear, Mr. Webb?”
“Come over to my house tomorrow and I’ll give you some.”
Tony found a wife who was used to being kept on a tight financial rein when he married Janet Leigh in 1951. Her father, Fred Morrison, who ten years later took an overdose of pills that ended his life, held the purse strings after her career got going. I remember coming across her at Rex, the mad hatter, where she was aching to buy a sweater for $75, but her dad said no. When he died, she was on the French Riviera with Mrs. Dean Martin, guests of Joe Kennedy.
Tony and Janet bought an eighteen-room house in 1958. (“Did you ever believe I’d end up a country gentleman?” he asked me.) They had enough money left to furnish the dining room, but not enough to buy much else. He was around at my house when I mentioned that I had a handsome, carved oak chair down in the basement, which I couldn’t use. “If you want it, take it. Go down and see.”
He came back conveying the heavy chair in his arms. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “I’ll put it in my car.” He’d started the motor to drive straight home before I caught him. “Come back here. We’ve got a party going. Janet can see it when you get home.” It still sits in their front hall, bleached and upholstered in white brocade.
MCA maneuvered Tony’s affairs so astutely that he now owns his own picture company, makes millions, drives a Rolls-Royce. “I hope that in a few years I’ll have enough security so I can drive around in an old battered station wagon if I want to,” he says. He lost Janet Leigh after he made a picture in South America with Yul Brynner, which featured a girl named Christine Kaufman, to whose apartment in the Château Marmont, in the company of her mother, Tony would go to have coffee on his way home.
He sent me another letter after I’d criticized him in the column last year over the postponement of Lady L. “I wonder,” I’d asked, “if actors realize they’re killing the goose that laid the golden eggs and are ruining their careers.”
“You might well have asked whether the studios realize what they are doing to actors,” Tony wrote back. “Because of the delays and stalling on this project, I have not made a film for eight months. True, I was paid a salary for part of that time but money alone can never make up for the fact that I might have two films during that period, that I could have been working in my chosen profession, could have been improving in the only way an actor can improve—by working.