Tony Curtis has written one of the best behind the scenes accounts of one of the greatest comedies ever made in the just published “The Making of ‘Some Like It Hot,’ My Memories of Marilyn Monroe and the Classic American Movie.”

Partnered with Hollywood film historian Mark A. Vieira, Curtis’ breezy look back is buttressed by facts, dates, road, studios, scenes, wardrobe fittings, and buttressed by a sheaf of publicity shots, many in color, that I’ve never seen before. 

The big revelation?  Sex with his leading lady.

Curtis had previously spoken (and probably written) about the 1950 affair the two had when his star was rising and she was yet to gain firm footing in her ascent as Hollywood’s most famous blonde.  For that first rendezvous Curtis borrowed the Malibu beach house of Howard Duff, the good-looking actor who was married for years to Ida Lupino.  It was brief; Monroe remained an enigmatic puzzle but was sexually spectacular, Curtis writes.  Their paths rarely crossed in the years that followed.

Cut to 1958 and Billy Wilder, the legendary writer director of classics like “Double Indemnity,” “The Lost Weekend,” “Sunset Boulevard, “Stalag 17” and Monroe’s “The Seven Year Itch.”  Vieira unearths how Wilder developed his idea for a comedy about two guys in drag – in 1958 a controversial idea to hang an entire picture upon – and how he needed a star to get the $2,8 million picture financed by United Artists.  Frank Sinatra was first choice. Mitzi Gaynor, who had won raves for the musical “South Pacific” and costarred with Sinatra in “The Joker Is Wild” was the leading candidate to play the romantic interest, the all-girl-band band singer Sugar Kane.  Sinatra skipped away and Wilder cast Curtis and Jack Lemmon as his compatriot, the two Chicago musicians who hide out in drag in the all girl band to escape a rubout from gangsters.

Wilder still needed a box-office star and, seemingly out of nowhere, he heard Monroe wanted to work with him again.  As Curtis tells it with a mixture of assurance and insecurity, filming was nightmarish.  In the summer of 1958 Monroe hadn’t worked in two years.  Her last movie “The Prince and the Showgirl” was a disappointment.  Proof that some things haven’t changed: Hollywood buzzed about a “comeback” as if she had been gone like Garbo. Another point, well documented, is how negative, how nasty every piece about Monroe was, from the first news conference to every set visit and interview.  There were cracks about her weight, her artistic aspirations, her tardiness, her marriage to Arthur Miller.

She was, Curtis recalls, very good on some days, capable of doing brilliant long takes in virtually one take.  And then there were the days where nothing worked and it took two days and way too many takes to get her to say one line correctly, “Where’s the bourbon?”

The sex?  That came in the middle of filming in San Diego for the Florida beach scenes. Monroe, minus Miller who had gone back to Connecticut,  invited Curtis to spend a night.  He did, although married as well.  His wife Janet Leigh was then pregnant with Jamie Lee Curtis and among the many photos are shots of him with daughter Kelly visiting Daddy on the beach.

When Monroe became pregnant, Curtis recounts a bizarre scene where he was summoned to her dressing room in the presence of her husband – his distaste for the always grim Miller is undisguised.  A discussion followed about whether the child was his or Miller’s.  No one ultimately had to worry who would claim the baby.  Monroe suffered yet another miscarriage, from yet another ectopic pregnancy, which Miller used in the press to lambaste Wilder as a tyrannical director who forced his poor wife to work in 104 degree heat.  It was never that hot in San Diego Curtis counters and Wilder, with whom he had a difficult relationship, was nevertheless the soul of patience with a star who practically gave him a nervous breakdown.

Curtis is now 84 and “Some Like It Hot” stands alongside “Sweet Smell of Success,” “The Boston Strangler” and “The Defiant Ones” as among the crowning achievements of a long and often impressive career.  His book highlights the hard work, pressure and personalities common to any filmmaking.  But it also suggests how a comedy that has stood the test of time, one that didn’t have a scripted ending when filming began, benefited from a few miracles, like Wilder’s persistence, Lemmon’s daffy fearlessness in drag as “Daphne” and Monroe’s very real movie magic.  In a time when everyone in the business seems afraid to say what really happens or what they really think, “The Making of ‘Some Like It Hot’” is also a welcome antidote.  Curtis couldn’t stand Miller or Paula Strasberg, Monroe’s acting coach, or May Reis, her secretary, and he says so.  He found Lemmon a straight arrow who really did think only of the work and was never competitive.  He’s candid about his insecurity, calling himself at one point “The handsomest man in Hollywood,” and then worrying why Wilder doesn’t praise his Cary Grant imitation or his Josephine the way he does Lemmon’s and Monroe’s work.

For Monroe fans, and I am one, the chronicle of bad behavior, selfishness and sheer unprofessionalism makes for one depressing revelation after another, and yet.  And yet she could conjure from the thinnest material – and she thought Sugar Kane an uninteresting, regressive “dumb blonde” role, one she did because she needed money to support Miller and pay his legal bills – one of her most magnetic portraits. A Life magazine cover boasted, “A comic Marilyn sets movie aglow,” and they weren’t kidding.  Can’t you still hear her, breathless, running at the climax down to the pier after she’s ditched the bike and is in her heels, yelling, “Wait for Sugar.”  Thanks to Curtis and Vieira, how she got there is no longer quite the mystery.

Tony Curtis and Mark A. Vieira’s “The Making of ‘Some Like It Hot,’ My Memories of Marilyn Monroe and the Classic American Movie” ($25.95, Wiley) should be in bookstores everywhere.  My interview with Vieira will air on “Beyond the Subtitles” on Art International Radio  (www.artonair.org) later this month.

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