Walter Matthau, not Gene Hackman. I thought the anecdote was pretty funny, although we can’t tell it here because person #3, a certain Hollywood actress, is still alive. I’d love to tune in TCM and hear Robert Osborne use it.
Ahh, g’won! 
Can you document that Matthau roomed with Curtis? The way I heard it, btw, that actress is famously dead, so it’s a UL in more senses than one.
I should have added that Curtis and Matthau were friends, not roommates. They were both students at the Dramatic Workshop in the late 1940s, before Curtis left for Hollywood. The story I heard involved a certain brunette hottie, a star in her day but now remembered only by fans of old movies and old movie fans.
The story appears on pp. 101-102 of Curtis’s memoir American Prince. And whoops, I forgot that Yvonne DeCarlo is indeed dead.
Go to this site and have fun:
Jonathan Larson lived in an apartment on Greenwich St that you could probably locate pretty easily. Also, if you don’t mind a more recent celebrity, Heath Ledger had the apartment in Soho where he lived for a while before he died last year.
That’s such a fabulous site, and yet so deliciously incomplete. I looked up three houses I knew that famous writers definitely lived in. Two of them wren’t mentioned, and the other had something factually wrong.
That’s too bad; I assumed it was trustworthy because it looks so fanatically compiled. The guy who does it welcomes additions and corrections, however.
He has a fabulous bibliography–I’ve read some of the books he lists (a former professor of mine wrote one, and a college classmate wrote another), and I’ll order some of the ones I didn’t know about. Thanks.
He doesn’t seem very intersted in providing documentation, though. He basically says “I got this info from reading all these books,” and then lists all the books. I know, from having read some, that there are a lot of contradictions as to what was where, and he doesn’t touch on this quality too much. He justs says “This was here” when it’s actually in fairly hot dispute where it was or even if it was.
I’ll cruise the site a little further. It’s fascinating, even if I need to check it out in more depth.
It’s a cool idea the thing is until the 50s pretty much everyone who was anyone at one time lived in New York City.
A lot of the famous vaudevillian (Like George Burns) were born on the East side of Lower Manhattan, which was a Jewish area.
Here’s a thought for you though. I used to read “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith and in the book she very thoroughly describes the street and the places in the book. This is Brooklyn. I am a huge fan of the book and I would LOVE to take a walking tour of the places she describes in the book. It’s Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
So I’d consider that too. Do tours of famous books about New York City. Or even people who commited true-crimes in New York City. Places where the crimes took place. That is a big untapped market
What about where Katharine Hepburn lived? All I know is it is uptown.