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.