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CLASSNOTES | Profile
’76
Jamie Lee Curtis
A Little Off, Pigtails and All “It is difficult to remember what Choate Rosemary Hall was like before Jamie Lee Curtis took it by storm this fall.” Not a bad first line for a letter of recommendation, and this one, written on behalf of Jamie Lee Curtis ’76, seems prescient. Few have taken so many fields by storm. She is a Golden Globewinning actress, starring in A Fish Called Wanda, True Lies, Halloween and its sequels, and the current TV series Scream Queens, among many other credits. She works tirelessly as an activist, promoting AIDS research and awareness, addiction recovery, and, most recently, Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. She’s even an inventor, having patented a compartmental diaper that holds its own wipes. Perhaps Curtis’s favorite role, though, is children’s book author. Over 20-odd years and through 11 books, she has created a uniquely screwball vision of the sorrows and joys of childhood.
Her latest book, This Is Me, published in September, celebrates the American melting pot, as well as the specific totems of heritage we all carry. (See review, page 64.) As an author, Curtis treats childhood with sensitivity and honesty, careful to show that even though kids and adults both make mistakes, they never stop loving each other. A strong current of emotional intelligence runs through her stories, and, as Curtis wrote in a recent email, the tales spring from her heart as much as her mind. “There’s been no premeditation,” she said. “I am not an intellectual and don’t go into any of this with an intellectual lens. There isn’t some big master plan to any of this work. The books pop into my head almost completely formed.” The books of her childhood, Curtis once told PBS’s Tavis Smiley, were “these sort of cherubic white people books. All the little kids had blonde hair and perfect little outfits and that’s just not the way I look at the world. I didn’t feel that way as a child. I felt like my pigtails were never even. Like I remember tugging on them trying to get them even and could never get them even.” Her own books’ embrace of such endearing dishevelment, Curtis acknowledges, reveals itself most vividly through Laura Cornell’s madcap illustrations. “There’s usually at least one visual that I have in my head that I want to try to get achieved,” Curtis wrote in her email. “Mostly, I allow her brilliant creative vision.” As Curtis told Smiley, “The way she illustrates is I think the way the world is, which is askew. Nothing matches, everybody’s a little off, and I love what she does.” Curtis, the daughter of actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, readily admits that she felt a little off when she first arrived at Choate Rosemary Hall: a new senior, away from her Southern California home for the first time. “My mother was doing a play in New York during my senior year of high school,” she said. “I decided to join her on the East Coast, which is why I ended up at Choate. My mother’s play closed in October so I ended up alone on the East Coast for the rest of the year.” While she struggled to settle into her academic career (“I was not a great student”), she coped with her homesickness – and quickly made a name for herself on campus – by organizing an exuberant set of festivities, including a male-only homecoming queen contest, for Deerfield Day, efforts that won her a letter from Principal Charles Dey praising her “initiative and contagious enthusiasm.” “Boarding school is both a time for academic enrichment and personal growth. My time at Choate was much more about personal growth,” Curtis says now. (Not long ago, she tweeted a photo of an Illinois driver’s license: “Look what I found. 1st fake ID when I attended Choate Rosemary Hall. Sent away 4 it. Amazed it worked.”) As she noted in her acceptance speech for the 1996 Alumnae Award, “The reason I keep talking about being an underachiever is because I was still supported; I was still nurtured; I was still encouraged by every member of the faculty I came in contact with.” Curtis, who married the actor and director Christopher Guest in 1984, now nurtures her own family (her daughter, Annie, 29, and son, Thomas, 20), along with the innumerable children who have grown up being amused, challenged, and validated by her books. (A twelfth, Me, My Selfie and I, will be published in 2018; Curtis describes it as “an unexpected think piece on this obsession that we all have, told from the point of view of a newly obsessed mother.”) Curtis has now been writing long enough to cultivate more than one generation as her audience. “I often meet adults who first liked this work when they were young,” she said. “That, obviously, is gratifying. It was not my intention ever to write books for children. It just happened. That there is an ongoing relationship to them through readers and then passing it onto their own children is a lovely idea.” andrea thompson Andrea Thompson is the co-author, with Jacob Lief, of the book I Am Because You Are.
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