LOS ANGELES — If there is one element that deters notable people from memoir writing, it is the pressure to tell all. Certainly that prospect put off the British actor Tim Curry, 79, a raconteur extraordinaire who entered the pantheon when he played the corseted, platform-heeled, insatiably libidinous Frank-N-Furter in the 1975 cult classic “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
“I always remember Errol Flynn’s memoir, which was called ‘My Wicked, Wicked Life,’” Curry said over lunch last month in Hollywood, and laughed that dark, molten lava laugh of his. “I thought, ‘Not me, buddy.’ But it was a very sellable title. I’m sure it whisked off the shelves.”
Tiny correction, close enough: The title was “My Wicked, Wicked Ways.” Curry’s lively new memoir, “Vagabond,” is fairly short on wickedness, unless his thickly cocaine-dusted New York 1980s count. A self-portrait refracted through his most significant roles, the book does include a certain amount of searingly intimate detail, notably about the life-altering stroke that he suffered in 2012, and from which, he said, “I’ve been recovering for quite a long time.”
But the particulars of desire, sex and romance in his personal history? He breaks his book’s fourth wall to tell readers that those will not be forthcoming.
“I guarantee you, if it matters,” he writes in the introduction, “that I have experienced true love, true heartbreak and everything in between, including no small amount of wreckage. Which, naturally, helps inform who I am. I have loved and been loved and I hope you have, too. But I’m not interested in your romances.”
Then, with the confrontational panache of Frank splashing the camera lens with water in “Rocky Horror,” he adds: “And specifics about my affairs of the heart or the bedroom are — respectfully — none of your [expletive] business.”
Even with that boundary firmly drawn, memoir writing is a vulnerable occupation. Slipping into characters is what Curry does. In autobiography, that option was not available.
“You don’t have anywhere to hide,” he said. “You’re trying to be as honest as you can be. Otherwise there’s not much point, I don’t think.”
But Curry’s résumé will tell you that he has always liked a bit of daring: fresh out of the University of Birmingham, getting naked in the original 1968 London production of “Hair”; a few years later, strutting Frank’s stuff at close range to live audiences in the stage musical “The Rocky Horror Show,” well before it became a film sensation.
Curry is a lion in winter now, getting around in a wheelchair and with his stamina not what it was since the stroke brought his life to a frightening interregnum. Yet he is still drawn to creative risk, unready to pack it in as an artist.
“I can’t quite imagine retiring and not ever working again,” he said.
He has thought about it, of course he has, but “trying to stretch” creatively is the stronger impulse. On that score, he is “cautiously pleased” with “Vagabond,” albeit with a couple of regrets.
“I regret some of the language in my book,” Curry said. “I have a very rich Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. And it’s certainly for real. It’s certainly the sound of my voice. But perhaps I could have honored my language more.”
I may have argued with him about that, on the grounds that his profanity is highly entertaining. (“It’s too easy to work blue,” he said.) I may have told him that he does cartwheels with language, and so what if he swears at the same time? That may have made him laugh until he coughed.
Another book regret, more poignant: “I think I could have maybe treated my mother better.”
The long recovery
“Vagabond” was always going to be his memoir’s title — because as the son of a Royal Navy chaplain, he had a peripatetic early childhood; because his actor’s life was similarly roaming; and, he said, “because in the 17th century in the criminal code, actors were lumped together with thieves and vagabonds.”
Curry has been in Los Angeles for decades now, longer than he’s ever lived anywhere, but he grew up mainly on the coast of bleak postwar England, where he was the little brother to a big sister, Judy, four years older.
He remembers their mercurial mother’s rages, which he later channeled into some of his more alarming characters, including the predatory supernatural clown Pennywise in the 1990 TV horror mini-series “It.” He remembers the gentleness and humor of their father, who died when he was 12 — a loss that informed his approach to the sweet scoundrel pirate Long John Silver in the 1996 movie musical “Muppet Treasure Island,” whose young hero is an orphaned boy.
Each of those roles gets a chapter in “Vagabond,” as do the wily butler Wadsworth from the 1985 movie “Clue,” and the jaunty King Arthur from the 2005 Monty Python hit musical “Spamalot,” Curry’s fifth Broadway show, which landed him his third Tony Award nomination.
For someone who has dedicated his career to performing fictional characters, he is refreshingly free of pretense. Over lunch, he paused to ask his caregiver Ramon Garcia, who sat next to him at the table, to adjust him in his wheelchair. Then, returning to the interview, Curry said, “Let’s continue working” — work being what an interview is, despite journalistic convention favoring the artifice, when a famous performer is involved, that it’s all just a friendly hang.
He was similarly frank in discussing his stroke, which occurred on July 13, 2012, while he was having a massage, and brought him “way too close to death.”
“It’s a curious experience,” he said. “I didn’t know it was happening at the time. They told me at the hospital and operated on my brain and removed, I think, two blood clots, which is a sort of grim picture. I found that very difficult to cope with as an image. There’s a German play called ‘Danton’s Death,’ where he says, ‘If you cut off the top of my head and paddled around in my brains, you would never know me.’ And it felt like somebody had paddled around in my brain.”
Marcia Hurwitz, Curry’s manager, has worked with him since the late 1980s. The two are so close that she was his emergency contact, as she learned when she got the call from the hospital.
She also soon heard from the gossip outlet TMZ, which she said had been tipped off immediately, because Curry had arrived under his own name. Squashing any coverage by refusing to talk, she then kept the news from coming out for nearly a year.
“I put him under an alias so nobody knew,” she said. “And when I moved him from one hospital to another, we did it in the middle of the night.”
An actor’s body is his instrument, and Curry’s had been altered radically. The stroke paralyzed his left side and, for a miserable while, obstructed the path between what he wanted to say and what came out of his mouth.
“I think my father had a stroke when he was 45 and died later from pneumonia,” he said. “And I kept remembering my mother talking about going to see him in hospital. He could only blink for yes and no. I dreaded that. I didn’t want that to happen to me. It was very peculiar not to be able to speak, and to find a voice again was difficult.”
For Curry, physical therapy was exciting, because he could make progress, but speech therapy was ineffective — “a joke, really,” he said.
His voice — so precise, so actorly, so British — returned on its own, then?
“It just sort of crept back,” he said. “My major instrument.” He laughed a small, ironic laugh.
Despite how difficult it is to imagine anyone other than him speaking words written in what is so clearly his voice, it is remarkable that he chose to narrate the audiobook of “Vagabond.” He has scores of voice credits in film, TV and video games, and many audiobook credits, too. But this is his first book narration since Ruth Rendell’s crime novel “Portobello” in 2010.
Recording “Vagabond” took more than a month, Hurwitz said. But Curry, determined that it be “as authentic as possible,” wasn’t about to hand the job off to some other actor.
Still, narrating his own history presented a challenge. “Because very often when I would sort of get either into an anecdote or a description of some place, I would inevitably go there,” he said. “And it would be hard to concentrate.”
He got through it, though, and in the audio he sounds authentic as can be: older and unprettified, more tentative in tone, yet unmistakably Tim Curry.
‘Exploring all our contradictions’
Curry is not a person who lives in the past (“I never did, never have, never will,” he said), and he hadn’t made a habit of revisiting old memories. Nonetheless, he told me, he always thought he would write a memoir — even if, as Hurwitz noted, it took “major persuading” to get him finally to do it.
He spoke his memories aloud into a recorder, and a collaborator, Domenica Alioto, helped to organize them.
It’s a fun read, thanks to Curry’s dry sense of humor (some wickedness there, actually; he never punches down, but Charlie Sheen gets a bop on the nose). There is also some exploration of his guiding philosophies — like one that dates to a brandy-soaked, gap-year night in Marrakech, where he was traveling with his boarding school friend, the future art critic Richard Cork. They made a pact there and then, committing “to exploring all our contradictions,” Curry writes.
Embodying the voracious Frank, in “Rocky Horror,” only reinforced that tenet in him.
“Playing somebody like that wakes you up to new dimensions of human nature,” he writes. “I can’t imagine a better role to enable me to embrace my contradictions and see them through. I learned not to limit myself — artistically, professionally, sexually or mentally.”
“Rocky Horror,” the cult creation so enduring that it’s borderline mainstream, has followed him ever since, and trailed him even into the private dining room at the restaurant. Deep into the interview, the chef, Sal Marino — with whom Curry has a warm, bantering rapport — strolled in and said: “I have a question for you. When was the last time you went to the movie theater and saw ‘The Rocky Horror Show?’”
The answer, it emerged, was circa 1978 at the old Tiffany Theater on the Sunset Strip, back when Curry had a rock band. His bandmates went with him — and the drummer, he said, “seemed very relieved” when he told him that, no, they didn’t need to dress up.
‘Time to go home for a while’
Perhaps the gutsiest disclosure in “Vagabond” comes late in the book, just before Curry recounts his stroke and its aftermath. In 2011, he went to the Chichester Festival Theater in England to star in Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Stoppard himself had recommended him. And Curry got axed — though “ill health, following an ongoing chest infection and repeated asthma attacks” was the publicly stated reason for his departure.
“I mean, I’d never been fired before,” Curry said. “That was pretty weird. And that was because I couldn’t remember the words, you know. I had somebody reading them into my ear. It was awful. And it didn’t work, as far as I was concerned. It was humiliating, really.”
So why bring it up in his own memoir, where he controls the narrative?
“Well, exactly because it’s all too glamorized, what we do,” he said, meaning actors. “And I think it’s important for people to know it can be really tough. And you can fall over.”
With the exception of a 2012 staged reading of Eric Idle’s ribald musical comedy “What About Dick?” in Los Angeles — which was recorded and later released — that was Curry’s last theater role. Whether that will remain true is to be determined, though. He writes in the memoir that he would like to perform again, and when I asked what that might look like, his mind went immediately to the stage, and to Britain.
“I really don’t know,” he mused. “There are some of the biggies, some of the classical parts that I would really like to do, I’m sure at some point, if I get my mojo back.”
Curry had been talking, and lunching, for nearly an hour and a half when I inquired whether he might write another memoir, if he had more to say.
He did not dismiss the idea, and mentioned that he had very much enjoyed the British actor Dirk Bogarde’s multivolume memoirs — a “super readable” chronicle of “a really interesting life.” Without pausing, and with no change to his conversational tone, he added: “I’m so sorry, but I’m actually in pain now.”
We can stop, I told him, and he asked, solicitously: “Have you got what you need?”
“Uhhhh, maybe,” I said, but my face was saying “oh no,” and he burst into laughter, low and rumbly.
“That was a very good reading,” he said. “‘Maybe,’” he mimicked, and mirrored my expression back at me. Then he stuck around to talk for several minutes more, because he is a pro, and acing the interview was the point of showing up.
His schedule lately has been unusually packed with interviews and public events tied to the 50th anniversary of “Rocky Horror,” and to his memoir. A more typical day for him is markedly quieter.
“Since I was incapacitated,” he said, “I spend a lot of time on or in my bed. But I try to get out as much as I can. I do little tours around the garden.”
He was thinking of traveling much farther afield for Christmas: back to England for the first time since “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”
“Time to go home for a while, see my family and friends and reconnect with my culture,” he said.
But he really likes living in California. It’s just that, with the memoir done, he has no major creative projects on the horizon.
“I miss starting something new,” he said. “So I’ve got to find something new to start.”
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