"The most popular movie comedy there ever was"

Tony Curtis (left) played Joe/Josephine and Jack Lemmon played Jerry/Daphne in Billy Wilder's comedy masterpiece "Some Like It Hot" in 1959.

You can have your "Tootsie," "La Cage Aux Folles" and "Victor/Victoria." But for me, the granddaddy of all cross-dressing movie comedies was 1959's ribald and raucous "Some Like It Hot."

Tony Curtis, who starred in the film with Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon, died yesterday. He was 85.

I interviewed Curtis six years ago for Style Weekly, just before he came to Richmond for a screening of "Some Like It Hot" at the Byrd Theater. We spoke for about a half hour by telephone. I was at my kitchen table, and Curtis was at his home in Las Vegas. He was charming and gracious, despite the fact that he must have answered questions like mine hundreds of times.

"It's still the most popular movie comedy there ever was," he told me.

In the film, set in 1929, Curtis and Lemmon play out-of-work musicians who accidentally witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and then hide from the Mob by disguising themselves as women and joining an all-girl band.

Curtis told me that the key to the success of the movie's cross-dressing element was that "there was no reason for us to be in drag except that our lives depended on it." Both he and Lemmon enjoyed playing in drag. "Jack loved it. He went to pieces over it. We weren't embarrassed or afraid of it. I didn't want to look like my character enjoyed it too much, but I was never worried about it really."

Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx and was the son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. He told me that director Billy Wilder, who left Berlin and came to Hollywood when Hitler rose to power, was tough on the set of "Some Like It Hot."

"Billy Wilder was an Oberstandartenfuhrer -- he was Austrian, you know -- and he kept a good strong hand on the project. But he allowed Jack and me to develop the characters."

In one of the film's funniest scenes, Curtis drops his Josephine character to pretend he is a wealthy businessman in order to woo Monroe's character.

"I decided that morning to use a Cary Grant accent for that scene" to give the character comic sophistication, Curtis told me. "Wilder let us work out our own roles to a great extent."

When we talked six years ago, Curtis, who served in the Navy during World War II before becoming a star, said he was enjoying living in Las Vegas and was spending a lot of time working on his paintings. He said his art was being shown in prestigious galleries. His plans at the time, he said, included a movie about the Holocaust. The film never materialized.

I was far from Tony Curtis's biggest fan. I enjoyed his movies more for the stories than for his personal appeal. But I was impressed by his intelligence, his charm and his sense of humor. He made our 2004 conversation easy and relaxed.

Curtis was the last of the principals from "Some Like It Hot" to die. Monroe died in died in 1962. Lemmon died in 2001. Wilder died in 2002.

Remembering D-Day

Pointe du Hoc is a 100-foot-high spit of land that juts into the ocean just west of Omaha Beach. It was an especially difficult point of attack for the U.S. Army Ranger Assault Group during Operation Overlord in World War II. Germany's Atlantic Wall defense at Pointe du Hoc included a battery of 155mm guns to protect the coastline. The U.S. 2nd Ranger Battalion was assigned to scale the cliff and destroy the strongpoint early on D-Day.

The Germans, however, moved the guns about a mile inland prior to the attack. The concrete bunkers were left intact and were considered by the Allies to be a major threat to the landings.

Few sites on the beaches and shores of the Normandy coast have been left as they were following the D-Day invasion. In 2004, our study group visited Pointe du Hoc. What we saw was sobering.

There are, however, other reminders visible today of the cost of Operation Overlord, as you'll see in this video.

"I was alone in France"

Vierville-sur-Mer on Omaha Beach has been built up considerably since the end of World War II. It is now a center for tourist exploration of the sites of the D-Day landings. (Don Dale photo, 2004)

Just east of Utah Beach was Omaha Beach. The Allied troops who landed there on D-Day faced a far more brutal German defense, and none of America's town, villages or cities paid a price so high as Bedford, Virginia.

The Bedford Boys, as they were later known, were part of the Army's 29th Infantry Division. There were 30 Bedford Boys in an assault force that numbered some 34,000 men.

The Bedford Boys were with the first infantrymen who approached Omaha Beach in the early hours of June 6, 1944. With German forces raining shells from the heights above, the beach quickly became a bloody abattoir.

German fire hit one landing craft as it approached the beach, sinking it with four of the Bedford Boys on board. They were quickly fished out of the water and rejoined the assault. Nineteen of the 30 died approaching the beach or immediately after they hit the sand, among them their company commander. In all, 22 of the 30 died on D-Day. Bedford lost more men per capita on that day than any other town in America. It was that fact that led Congress to support the creation of what is now the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford.

Years after the end of the war, one of the Bedford Boys described what happened when he landed on French soil. Elisha Ray Nance, the son of a tobacco farmer, told a Roanoke TV station: "I waded out of the water up on the beach. I could not see anybody in front of me. I looked behind, and there's nobody following me. I was alone in France."

Nance was the last survivor of the Bedford Boys. He died in 2009 at the age of 94.

Utah Beach, Normandy

(2004 photo by Don Dale)

Utah Beach could not have been more peaceful or serene on the September morning in 2004 when we arrived on the Normandy coast. The tide was out, leaving an immense expanse of smooth sand leading up to the tall green grass that waved in a chilly, light breeze.

A horse drawing a sulky and driver made his way slowly along the water's edge, picking his way around tidal pools. Not another soul was in sight.

Utah Beach was a far different place on the morning of June 6, 1944, as Operation Overlord -- the Allied invasion of Europe -- began. Utah was the name given by war planners to the right flank, the westernmost, of the Allied landing beaches.

At a few minutes after 6:30 a.m., the first wave of Allied landing craft lowered their ramps, and American soldiers waded about 100 yards to the beach. Led by Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., they were about 2,000 yards south of their intended landing zone. Undeterred, Gen. Roosevelt told his men "We'll start the war from here." (Gen. Roosevelt was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions that morning.)

At the end of the day, the men who landed on Utah Beach counted themselves lucky. Some 23,250 troops landed safely, along with 1,700 vehicles. There were about 200 casualties. Unlike other D-Day beaches, Utah was not heavily defended, and a pre-invasion Allied bombardment had eliminated many fortified positions. American bombers flew low to provide air support. And, significantly, 13,000 glider and paratroop forces from the 101st and 82nd U.S. Airborne Divisions that had dropped inland hours before the coastal assault had been fighting their way toward the beach, clearing enemy positions and preventing any significant German counterattack.

Utah Beach was the first of the Allied invasion sites we visited that day. We walked quietly along the pristine beach. A few of us used film canisters to scoop up sand to take back home.

And we tried to imagine what it must have been like 60 years before.

"Nothing is the same"

(Photo by Don Dale, 2004)

The three veterans of the Normandy invasion in 1944 who accompanied us on a 60th anniversary tour made it somehow more authentic. All we had to do was look at any one of them and remember that they had been there, they had risked their lives, they had experienced the horrors.

As our bus approached the coast of France one morning, they agreed to pose for a picture. The experience seemed to make them slightly uncomfortable. They weren't seeking attention, and none of the three was comfortable with the word "hero."

But they couldn't escape the fact that they had been there 60 years before, under circumstances that were nothing like those of a group of tourists in 2004 who viewed D-Day as history and not as a personally terrifying, ever-present reality that still shaped 21st-century thoughts and feelings, and even yet provided a framework for viewing the world.

I am deliberately not using their names or hometowns: I neglected to seek their permission then, and I have since lost touch with them. If they are still alive, the youngest would be in his mid-80s.

They were three distinct personalities.

One rarely talked to anybody on the tour other than his wife. He would exchange pleasantries if prompted, but beyond that -- nothing.

Another was gregarious and hearty, full of the excitement of seeing Normandy again for the first time since he was a teenager. He socialized with anybody who wanted to strike up a conversation and enjoyed telling stories. He, his son and I enjoyed too many snifters of Calvados one evening as he told stories of 60 years ago.

The third D-Day veteran was one of the first people I met as we tour participants gathered in a hotel dining room in Paris on the night before our excursion began. His wife chattered away, excited about our upcoming visit to Omaha Beach, where her husband had landed. As is the case with many veterans who had horrific experiences, he never told her much about what had happened to him that day. For their anniversary, she had booked the tour. He, she said, had been reluctant to come along. She, however, had finally persuaded him, but it was clear that he didn't share her eagerness to see Normandy again. For him, the memories were best left in the past, undisturbed.

Several days later, when we arrived at Omaha Beach, I saw him at the end of a long pier stretching out into the English Channel, standing alone, apparently lost in thought. I wanted to walk out to the end of the pier myself to photograph the beach as it might have been seen by those wading ashore. But I was reluctant to disturb him. Instead, I busied myself for a while reading inscriptions on a nearby monument, chatting with others on the tour, and taking a photograph of the -- to me -- incongruous "Omaha" miniature-golf course just across the road.

Perhaps 20 minutes passed before I again looked out to the end of the pier, and he was still there, still alone. I made my way out to where he stood, apologizing for interrupting. "Are you okay?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. He sighed deeply.

"I was trying to figure out where we landed. I can't find any landmarks. It's all been built up. Nothing is the same. I just don't know where I was."

And with that he walked back along the pier to the beach. I took a few photographs and followed him back to the shore as the waves lapped gently on the sand.

Pvt. John Steele's D-Day story

The tower of the church in the village of Sainte-Mère-Église stands today much as it has since Medieval times. (Don Dale photo)

If you've read the book or seen the movie "The Longest Day," you know the story behind what you see in the picture I took in Sainte-Mère-Église.

The church has stood in some form since the 1080s in a town that has seen its share of wars -- from the Hundred Years War (1337 to 1453) that pitted two royal houses against each other in their quest for the French throne to the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), primarily fought between French Catholics and Huguenot Protestants.

Allied and German forces also faced off in Sainte-Mère-Église on June 6, 1944 -- D-Day.

In the early hours of the invasion of Europe, just before 2 a.m., American paratroopers suffered heavy casualties as the Germans who were occupying the village began to realize what was happening. Burning buildings in Sainte-Mère-Église illuminated the sky, making easy targets of the invading paratroopers. Some landed directly on the fires. Many landed in trees or dangled from utility poles and were shot.

One man who made the jump over Sainte-Mère-Église featured prominently in author Cornelius Ryan's book "The Longest Day" and in the 1962 film that followed. U.S. Army Private John Steele's parachute snagged the tower of the town church. Wounded, Steele hung from the church for two hours, watching the fighting below and pretending to be dead -- until the Germans eventually took him prisoner. Though deafened by the church bells that had rung since the invasion began, Steele soon escaped and rejoined his division in time for an Allied attack on the village that captured 30 Germans and killed another 11.

When I was there for the 60th anniversary D-Day observance in 2004, the French had gone all out to welcome Americans back to Sainte-Mère-Église. In the intervening years, Ryan's book and the movie had made a folk hero out of John Steele. To memorialize Steele's story, the people who lived in the ancient French town had hung a parachute and an effigy from the church tower on which he was accidentally entangled.

Private Steele survived the war and continued to visit the town throughout his life. The townspeople made him an honorary citizen. A tavern named for Steele now stands near the town square . Steele died on May 16, 1969, in Fayetteville, N.C., just three weeks before the 25th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.

But thanks to Ryan's book, the movie, and the people of Sainte-Mère-Église, his story lives on.

If only ...

Some historians disagree with the traditional view that Harold II is the figure struck in the eye with an arrow in this section of the Bayeux Tapestry.

If Harold Godwinson had not been struck in the eye with an arrow at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, he might have remained on the throne as the king of England.

And if frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their little butts every time they jumped. (My Appalachian grandfather, who was never at a loss for aphorisms, used to say that every time I'd begin a sentence with "if.")

I had heard about the Bayeux Tapestry since high-school history class. The tapestry, which is really an embroidery, is a 234-foot-long illustration of the events leading up to the epic Norman conquest of England. The really exciting part is toward the end and depicts the Battle of Hastings, which took place not far from the English Channel seacoast at Hastings, England, in 1066. It was there that the invading Norman French defeated the Anglo-Saxon English. The Anglo-Saxons were led by Harold Godwinson, who had recently been crowned as king of England, and the Normans were led by the man who was thenceforth known as William the Conqueror. Legend has it that Harold was killed by a Norman arrow that struck him in the eye.

There's a lot more to the story of the Bayeux Tapestry, which could be said to be an early example of pictorial journalism. Some date its origins to the 1070s, just a few years after the battle was fought, although the earliest written reference to it is from 1476.

The tapestry, which was made in England, was earlier housed in the cathedral at Bayeux, which is on the Normandy coast and was the first French city to be liberated after D-Day in World War II. Now it's on display in what used to be the Bayeux Seminary, a classical-style building that stands on the site of a medieval priory from the 13th century.

As our D-Day anniversary group entered the room housing the tapestry, which is dimly lit to preserve the ancient cloth and dyes, we were given hand-held audio devices that told the story of the tapestry picture-by-picture. As somebody who spent a career in a museum, I picked up right away on the fact that the audio devices also kept us moving right along in order to stay in synch with what we were hearing. Visitors flock to see the tapestry, and if somebody stops to study a panel, the line clumps up quickly. Yet I didn't sense that I was being rushed.

And as in museums everywhere now, the exit leads through a gift shop. It costs about $10 to see the tapestry, and for me it was money well spent. But the gift shop is where museums really make their budgets. And that's okay by me. As Harold might have said, it beats a sharp stick in the eye.