March 29, 1959: "Some Like It Hot" Premieres

Left to right: Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon

March 29, 1959: Some Like It Hot premieres. It features 3 all-time legends at their peak -- 4, if you count director Billy Wilder.

The film begins in Chicago in 1929, with a pair of jazz musicians: Tony Curtis plays Joe, a saxophone player and an irresponsible ladies' man; and Jack Lemmon plays Jerry, a nervous double bass player. Prohibition is in progress, and Chicago is ground zero for gangland defiance of it. Joe and Jerry work in a speakeasy run by "Spats" Colombo, played by George Raft.

The speakeasy gets raided by the police. Spats finds out a rival gang's leader ratted him out, and so he has the gang gunned down, a reflection of the real-life St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Joe and Jerry see it, and know that Spats know the saw it. They have to get out of Chicago immediately: The weather is cold, but the heat is on them.

They disguise themselves as women named Josephine and Daphne, and join Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators, an all-female band on a train to a gig in nice warm Miami. On board, they meet the band's singer, Sugar Kowalczyk, a.k.a. Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe. Among the other "girls" in the band is a fiddler played by future Star Trek actress Grace Lee Whitney.

Sugar confides in the new "girls," saying that saxophone players have taken advantage of her in the past, and she wants to meet "a gentle, bespectacled millionaire" in Miami. So, upon arrival, while they perform -- Joe and Jerry in drag -- Joe takes on a 2nd disguise: "Junior," an heir to Shell Oil. Sugar likes him.

Curtis was then married to another blonde bombshell, Janet Leigh. Their daughter, actress Jamie Lee Curtis, was born between the end of filming and the release of the film. Curtis would later make the shocking claim that he didn't like kissing Monroe, the most popular sex symbol of the era.

An actual millionaire, the much-married, aging, mama's-boy Osgood Fielding III, played by Joe E. Brown, pursues "Daphne." Joe convinces Jerry to keep Osgood occupied onshore so that "Junior" can take Sugar to Osgood's yacht, and pass it off as his own. Once on the yacht, to "reel her in," Joe/Junior claims impotence, and that he would marry a woman who could cure him. She "cures him."

While this is going on, Osgood and Jerry/Daphne dance the tango all night. Back at the hotel, Jerry tells Joe, "I'm getting married!" Joe says, "Congratulations. Who's the lucky girl?" Jerry says, "I am!" Joe snaps him out of it, reminding him that he's "a boy."

But at least they're safe, right? Wrong: There's a Mob sit-down in Miami, and Spats is going to be there. They have to flee, and Joe, as Junior, calls Sugar on the phone, and tells her that he has to break up with her and marry a woman of his family's choosing, breaking her heart.

Joe and Jerry hide under a table at the banquet, and see Johnny Paradise, a young hitman played by Edward G. Robinson Jr., son of another actor well-known for playing gangsters, shoot and kill Spats. (There's an inside joke: Johnny is constantly flipping a coin, which was a gesture that Raft had made famous in gangster movies a quarter of a century earlier, possibly also inspiring the Batman villain Two-Face.) Now, they're in the clear of Spats, but not his enemies.

They put on their drag disguises. Joe sees Sugar onstage, singing a lament to lost love. He runs onto the platform and kisses her, causing Sugar to realize that Josephine and Junior are the same person. Jerry persuades Osgood to take "Daphne" and "Josephine" away on his yacht. Sugar runs from the stage at the end of her performance, and jumps aboard Osgood's launch just as it is leaving the dock with Joe, Jerry, and Osgood.

Joe tells Sugar the whole truth, and tells her that she deserves better, but Sugar wants him anyway, realizing he is the first man to genuinely care for her. Meanwhile, Jerry tries to get out of his promise to marry Osgood, by listing reasons why "Daphne" and Osgood cannot marry, including, "I've been living in sin with a saxophone player!" Osgood says, "I forgive you." Daphne says, "I can never have children!" Osgood says, "We can adopt some." Finally, Jerry rips off his wig, and says, "I'm a man!" And Osgood says, "Nobody's perfect."

The film ends there, but leaves it ambiguous as to how Joe and Jerry can stay out of the Mob's crosshairs. There would be no Federal Witness Protection Program until 1970. The easiest presumption is that Osgood could have used his wealth and connections to get them new identities -- identities which did not require them to pose as women.

So here, we have a film with gang violence, premarital sex, impotence, cross-dressing, a potential same-sex marriage, and a man questioning his gender identity -- all this, in a film released in 1959. The Ike Age. The Frigid Fifties, rather than the Fabulous side of the decade. The Hays Code, the puritanical guide that had ruled Hollywood with an iron fist since 1934, refused to approve the film. Ordinarily, this would have been a death blow: People would have been afraid to go see it, lest they be branded as "immoral."

Billy Wilder didn't care. He had already directed Ninotchka, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch (with Monroe), Love in the Afternoon, and Witness for the Prosecution. Some of these films had already tried the censors' patience. Along with his next film, The Apartment, Wilder proved that he didn't need the Hays Code's approval, and that people would watch his movies, anyway. It took until 1968, and a few more challenges, for the Code to finally fall.

Some Like It Hot was nominated for 6 Academy Awards, but won only one, for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White -- possibly Wilder's comeuppance for his defiance.

In 1972, the film was adapted into the Broadway musical Sugar, with Elaine Joyce in the title role, and Robert Morse and Tony Roberts as Joe and Jerry. It was re-adapted with an all-black cast under the Some Like It Hot name in 2022, and won 4 Tony Awards, including J. Harrison Ghee, who, as Jerry and Daphne, became, along with Alex Newell for Shucked at the same ceremony, the 1st nonbinary actor to win a Tony Award. (Since both were playing born-male roles, they had been put in the "Best Actor" category, rather than "Best Actress.")

At the time of filming, Marilyn Monroe was married to playwright Arthur Miller, and 4 months pregnant, making her curvier than ever. (I still wonder if Lemmon's line, "It's like Jell-O on springs!" was an ad-lib.) But she lost the baby, and she and Miller soon split up. She died in 1962. Edward G. Robinson Jr., a.k.a. Manny Robinson, also died young, at 40, of a heart attack in 1974. He had outlived his legendary father by only a year.

Joe E. Brown died in 1973, George Raft in 1980, Jack Lemmon in 2001, Billy Wilder in 2002, and Tony Curtis in 2006.

UPDATE: On April 5, 2022, 7 days after posting, the film's last surviving castmember died: Nehemiah Persoff, who played Mob leader "Little Napoleon" in the Miami banquet scene. He was 102 years old.

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March 29, 1959 was a Sunday. Hockey star Brad McCrimmon was born. His sport was into its Stanley Cup Playoffs, but no games were played on this day. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season.

There were 2 games played in the NBA. The Syracuse Nationals beat the Boston Celtics, 133-121 at the Onondaga County War Memorial (now the Upstate University Medical Arena) in Syracuse, New York. Dolph Schayes scored 39 points. And the Minneapolis Lakers beat the St. Louis Hawks, 106-104 at the St. Paul Auditorium in St. Paul, Minnesota. Rookie Elgin Baylor scored 33 points.

February 14, 1951: Boxing's St. Valentine's Day Massacre

February 14, 1951: The Middleweight Championship of the World is contested at the Chicago Stadium. It is a brutal fight, one that brought up memories of a previous February 14 in the same city, in 1929, when Chicago crime boss Al Capone had members of rival Bugs Moran's gang killed. Like that event, this fight gets the nickname "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre."

Walker Smith Jr., born in 1921 in Georgia and raised in Manhattan's Harlem, fought under the name Sugar Ray Robinson. He fought professionally 75 times before first winning a title, the Welterweight Championship of the World, by beating Tommy Bell in 1946. In those 75 fights, he had only 1 loss and 1 draw.

Giacobbe LaMotta, nicknamed Jake, was born in 1922 on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and grew up in The Bronx. "The Bronx Bull" had to fight even more times to get a title shot, going 72-13-3 before winning the Middleweight Championship of the World in 1949, beating French fighter Marcel Cerdan at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. (It was renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961.) Though not a heavyweight, and not lefthanded, essentially, he was "Rocky" before Sylvester Stallone wrote his movie.

In 1970, LaMotta wrote a memoir, Raging Bull. In 1980, Martin Scorcese made a film of it, and Robert de Niro won an Academy Award for playing LaMotta, making him a star -- though hardly a role model -- to a new generation. He became a popular after-dinner speaker, with lines like, "I fought Sugar Ray so often, I almost got diabetes!"

They fought 6 times. Here were the 1st 5:

* 1. October 2, 1942, at the old Madison Square Garden. Robinson won a unanimous decision after 10 rounds.

* 2. February 5, 1943, at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. Also a decision after 10 rounds, but, this time, LaMotta won. This would be the only defeat in Robinson's 1st 133 fights: Going in, he was 40-0.

* 3. February 26, 1943, also at the Olympia. Just 3 weeks later, it went the full 10 rounds, and Robinson was declared the winner.

* 4. February 23, 1945, at Madison Square Garden. Another 10-round win by decision for Robinson.

* 5. September 26, 1945, at Comiskey Park in Chicago. It went 12 rounds, and Robinson won by a split decision. The 1st 4 decisions had not been controversial. This one was close, but few people thought LaMotta had been "robbed."

By February 14, 1951, LaMotta had defended the Middleweight Championship 6 times, and was 78-14-3. Robinson was 121-1-2, and had willingly given up the Welterweight Championship to move up in weight class and try to take the Middleweight title. To do it, he would have to fight LaMotta for a 6th time, at Chicago Stadium, home of the NHL's Chicago Black Hawks (the NBA's Bulls hadn't been founded yet), and already the site of some big fights.

This time, the fight was not really a contest. Although LaMotta was one of the hardest hitters the fight game has ever known, Robinson was a smarter fighter. LaMotta was a "puncher," but Robinson was a "boxer," a stylist instead of a mere hitter. Some boxing historians have considered Robinson to be "pound-for-pound, the greatest boxer who ever lived." They rank him ahead of Heavyweight Champions Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali; and ahead of the Welterweight and Middleweight Champions who dominated the early 1980s: Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, Roberto Durán, and a man who would alter his real name to evoke memories of Robinson, Sugar Ray Leonard.

Robinson outboxed LaMotta for the first 10 rounds. Had the fight been set for only 10 rounds, it would probably not be well-remembered today, and would be considered just another of Sugar Ray's many wins. But he then unleashed a series of savage combinations on LaMotta for 3 rounds. In the 13th round, he dealt LaMotta his 1st legitimate knockout loss in 95 professional bouts. (LaMotta had lost by knockout to Billy Fox earlier in his career. However, that fight was later ruled to have been fixed.) Because of the date, the location in Chicago, and its brutality, the fight became known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

The people of France hated LaMotta for beating Cerdan, even more so when Cerdan, trying to fly back across the Atlantic Ocean for a rematch, was killed in a plane crash. Robinson went to Europe after beating LaMotta, bringing his pink Cadillac on the cruise ship with him, and was wildly cheered in Paris as the man who had avenged Cerdan.

It was a working vacation: He kept fighting. He fought in Paris, Zürich, Antwerp, Berlin and Turin. But on July 10, just 9 days after his Turin fight, and getting into the ring for the 7th time in as many weeks, Robinson took his 129-1-2 record into the Earl's Court Arena in London, and lost his title to British boxer Randy Turpin.

He got the title back from Turpin, 3 months later at the Polo Grounds in New York. He ended up winning and losing the Middleweight title 5 times. In 1952, he tried to move up to the Light Heavyweight Championship, but in a brutally hot Yankee Stadium, the Champion, Joey Maxim, defeated him. For the rest of his life, people told Maxim the only reason he lost is that Robinson couldn't handle the heat. "Maybe you think it wasn't hot for me," he told such people.

Sugar Ray Robinson last won a title fight in 1958, last lost one in 1961, and finally retired in 1965, at the age of 44, with a record of 174-19-6. He ran a famous restaurant in Harlem, but developed dementia, probably as a result of having had nearly 200 professional fights, and died in 1989. Johnny Barnes played him in Raging Bull.

Jake LaMotta never had another title fight after getting destroyed by Robinson in Chicago. He kept fighting until 1954, retiring with a record of 83-19-4. He ran a bar in Miami, and became an actor, before writing his memoir and going on the after-dinner circuit. He died in 2017.

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February 14, 1951 was a Wednesday. English soccer legend Kevin Keegan was born on this day.

Baseball and football were out of season. There was 1 game in the NHL: The New York Rangers beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 5-1 at the old Madison Square Garden.

And there were 4 games in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the Rochester Royals, 81-65 at the old Madison Square Garden. This turned out to be a preview of the NBA Finals, but the result would be reversed, as the Royals won in 7 games. The Royals became the Cincinnati Royals in 1957, the Kansas City Kings in 1972, and the Sacramento Kings in 1985.

* The Fort Wayne Pistons beat the Syracuse Nationals, 77-75 at North Side High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The Pistons moved to Detroit in 1957. The Nats became the Philadelphia 76ers in 1963.

* The Tri-Cities Blackhawks beat the Indianapolis Olympians, 98-91 at the Wheaton Field House in Moline, Illinois. The "Tri-Cities" were Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, and, across the Mississippi River, Davenport, Iowa. Today, Bettendorf, Iowa is usually included, and the region is known as the "Quad Cities." The Blackhawks became the Milwaukee Hawks the next season, the St. Louis Hawks in 1955, and the Atlanta Hawks in 1968.

* And the Minneapolis Lakers beat the Baltimore Bullets, 99-71 at the Minneapolis Auditorium. The Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960. The Bullets folded in 1954, and had no connection to the Baltimore Bullets that began in 1963, moved to Washington in 1973, and were renamed the Wizards in 1997.

February 14, 1929: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre

February 14, 1929: The most famous killing in the history of American organized crime takes place on the North Side of Chicago. Because it happened on February 14, it becomes known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Chicago's organized crime was then divided between the North Side Gang, led by St. Paul, Minnesota-born Irish gangster George "Bugs" Moran, and the South Side Mob, led by Brooklyn-born Italian gangster "Scarface" Al Capone. With World War I still fresh in people's memories, their fight for control of bootlegging liquor under Prohibition was known as "The Bootleg Battle of the Marne."

Bugs Moran

Seven members of Moran's gang were lured to the SMC Cartage warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, in the Lincoln Park section of the North Side, with the promise of a stolen, cut-rate shipment of whiskey from Detroit's infamous Purple Gang. But when they got there, they were accosted by 4 men, 2 dressed as Chicago police officers and 2 claiming to be plainclothes detectives. The uniforms and badges were easy enough to obtain, since Capone was said to have half the city's police force on his payroll.

The fake cops lined the men against a wall of the warehouse, and shot them with submachine guns. The victims were: 

* Albert Kachellek, 40, Moran's second-in-command.

* Adam Heyer, 40, Moran's bookkeeper and business manager.

* Peter Gusenberg, 40, and his brother...

* Frank Gusenberg, 35, both enforcers for the North Side Gang.

* John May, 34, a mechanic for the North Side Gang.

* Reinhardt Schwimmer, 29, an optician and gambler, associated with the North Side Gang.

* Albert Weinshank, age unknown, who ran several operations for Moran.

The rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire had become the ugliest roar of the "Roaring Twenties."

Weinshank was the problem: With his face and his clothes, he resembled Moran, and the Capone men thought they had Moran. They didn't: He had decided to sleep in that day, which explains why his Number 2, Kachellek, went. Being lazy had saved Moran's life.

Frank Gusenberg was the only man who lived long enough for the real police to arrive. As has so often been the case with those who survive gangland slayings, however briefly, he refused to identify his killers. Capone denied any involvement. And no one was ever indicted for the crime, let alone convicted of it.

The result was, in spite of surviving, Moran lost his influence. Soon, Capone was in command of all of Chicago crime. Capone was finally busted for income tax evasion, and served time in federal prison from 1931 to 1939, before being released for health reasons. He died in exile in Miami in 1947. 

Al Capone. "Scarface" preferred this angle, since his

broken-bottle-caused scars were on the other side of his face.

Moran tried several petty crimes to rebuild his former fortune, but failed, and died in prison in 1957 -- 10 years after Capone, but he could hardly be said to have "beaten" him.

Pretty much every movie made about Capone re-creates the Massacre. The original 1932 version of Scarface, where Paul Muni's character Tony Camonte is based on Capone, re-created it. So did the 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot, where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play musicians, unconnected to organized crime, who have to flee Chicago because they witnessed the Massacre. On an episode of The Golden Girls, Sophia Petrillo (played by Estelle Getty) claimed to have witnessed it. (The character would have been 22 years old at the time, so, at the least, it was possible.)

On February 14, 1951, Sugar Ray Robinson defended the Middleweight Championship of the World against Jake LaMotta at the Chicago Stadium. It was the 6th fight between them, and in their 2nd fight, LaMotta dealt Robinson what was then his only loss. This time, Robinson left no doubt, pummeling LaMotta to the point where the referee stopped the fight in the 13th round. Because of the date and the location, the fight became known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

LaMotta, played by Robert De Niro in the 1980 film Raging Bull, said, "I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times, I got diabetes." De Niro played Capone in the 1987 film version of The Untouchables, although that film begins in 1930, and does not show the Massacre.

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February 14, 1929 was a Thursday. Actor Vic Morrow was born. He was the father of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.

It was the off-season for baseball and football, and the NBA hadn't been founded yet. But 5 games were played in the National Hockey League that day:

* The New York Rangers, defending Stanley Cup Champions, lost to the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-1 at the Mutual Street Arena. Maple Leaf Gardens opened 2 1/2 years later.

* The New York Americans and the Detroit Cougars played to a tie, 1-1 at the still-new building that would later be called "the old Madison Square Garden." The Cougars would become the Detroit Falcons the next year, and the Detroit Red Wings in 1932.

* The Montreal Maroons beat the Ottawa Senators, 4-0 at the Montreal Forum.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Bruins, 2-0 at the Duquesne Gardens in Pittsburgh. Named for the city's baseball team, after the next season, the Pirates moved across Pennsylvania, becoming the Philadelphia Quakers, but their awful performance and the Great Depression led to their folding.

* And, elsewhere in Chicago that night, the Montreal Canadiens beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 1-0 at the Chicago Coliseum. The Chicago Stadium opened a few weeks later. In 1986, it was discovered that the Hawks' original charter had "Blackhawks" written as one word, despite the fact that it had nearly always been written as two words, "Black Hawks." So the name was then formally changed to the single word.