Tom Junod has penned a beautiful goodbye letter to Tony Curtis, recapping his interview with the man from 1995:
As an actor, he was never quite as convincing in heroic roles as he was when he revealed an element of cowardice, and so he was, to my mind, brave. As a young man, he was intoxicated by his own beauty, and the kind of life it would allow him; in middle age, when some of his beauty faded, he couldn't let the intoxication go, and became an addict, losing everything, from his hair (a primal wound in a man of Tony's dark vanity) to his son, who followed the course of his father and overdosed.
When I met him, he was a man who swallowed, every morning, the full draught of regret an American life could offer, and yet went about his days (and nights: his very late nights) determined to get intoxicated — intoxicated by what was left of his beauty; intoxicated by the fantastic fact of the freedom his beauty still afforded him in Hollywood and in America; intoxicated, at this late stage of the game, by his potential, even while he was intoxicated on tequila and painkillers — and stay that way. And, yes, he still got laid, in those pre-Viagra days, with a dose of prostaglandins he injected in his thigh to give him an erection post-prostate surgery.
The Dish 