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Actor's baby blues burn in memory
By JAMES THORNER, Times Staff Writer
NEW PORT RICHEY -- Jackie Simcock Owen was a budding California journalist, barely out of high school, when she interviewed the movie star with the slick black hair and big-screen baby blues. Fifty years later, Owen is 69, retired and living along the Pithlachascotee River in New Port Richey. And the movie star? Tony Curtis is alive and well and strutting on stage this weekend in Clearwater in the musical Some Like It Hot. The old showbiz trouper's baby blues still twinkle, his black hair now a grayish toupee. Owen, her hair still blond as it was in the 1950s when she was known as Jackie Russell, can't help but admire Curtis' stamina at 77 years old. "He's hung in there so long through thick and thin," Owen said this week as she leafed through black-and-white snapshots of herself with Curtis. "I'm proud of him." Rejecting her mother's advice that she attend college in Santa Barbara, Owen persuaded an editor to make her a reporter for her hometown daily newspaper, the Pasadena Independent. Pasadena being near the heart of the California film industry, celebrity stories naturally fell in Owen's lap. Among the most memorable was the day when Curtis' agent phoned the paper and requested a publicity piece. It was Owen's day off, but she begged to go anyway. "I hadn't washed my hair. I looked like 'Ahhhhh!' But I wasn't going to miss it," Owen said. Curtis was making his 19th movie, a sports melodrama called The All-American. Wearing an Elvis-style pompadour, the 28-year-old star played Nick Bonelli, a university quarterback who wants to drop sports to focus on studying architecture. Curtis' co-star was real-life sports hero Frank Gifford, who played a character named Stan Pomeroy. Part of the movie was shot at the Rose Bowl, the stadium in Pasadena. Owen showed up for what would be three days of photos and interviews with Curtis. Owen noted Curtis' handsome face and his relatively small frame, at least for the football uniform he was wearing. "He was a lot of fun and was into reading palms," Owen said of Curtis on the set. "So one of the photos I have shows him sitting in a director's chair telling me my fortune." Curtis was married then to the first of his five wives, Janet Leigh, mother of actor Jamie Lee Curtis. Despite Owen's youth and availability, Curtis, who admitted in a Times interview he romanced Marilyn Monroe in the early 1950s, was every bit the gentleman with his interviewer. "Everyone was very professional. It was all business with them," Owen said. Owen spent about four years working for the newspaper before she moved away, got married and eventually came to Florida. But not before she interviewed such stars as William Holden, Tab Hunter and Lawrence Welk. As for Curtis, he went on to make such films as The Defiant Ones, Some Like It Hot, Operation Petticoat and Spartacus. Since their meeting 50 years ago, their paths have never crossed. Now Curtis is a few miles down the highway in Clearwater. But for Owen, who won't have a chance to see Some Like It Hot on stage, it might as well be a chasm. "I'd love to see him. It's not because I don't want to," Owen said. "But I wish him good luck."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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