The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
How a New Haven Joe went Hollywood
Charm, good looks, good luck propelled him to movie land
J. Arthur (Joe) Lenzi was just another local guy helping to build the big bridge over the Quinnipiac River in 1957 when some of the older construction workers who had noted his good looks kept telling him: “What are you doing here, kid? You should go to Hollywood and become a movie star!”
Recalling his life-changing decision to heed that advice, Lenzi said: “I was seeing those guys with two or three kids and they’d married their childhood sweethearts and they could barely make ends meet. It scared the hell out of me. I said to myself: ‘This is not going to happen to me.’”
And so on an October morning, Lenzi and his buddy, Red Nazario, headed off to California in a new Chrysler 300. They were paid to drive it across the country and deliver it to an address in Los Angeles.
This odyssey landed Lenzi, just 19, in “La La Land,” a fantasy landscape where he spent years partying with movie stars and plunging into romantic adventures with gorgeous women. He has told his story in a selfpublished book entitled “Easy Access: From Boudoirs to Movie Stars.” He subtitled it “A Memoir of Good Looks.”
Lenzi hung on in Hollywood until 1992, when he returned to New Haven to keep a promise to his elderly parents. “I had told my father: ‘Dad, I will never put you or mom in a (nursing) home.’ My sister and I took care of them in their own home.”
Lenzi and I met last Monday afternoon at his condo on Townsend Avenue. He lives there with his wife, the woman he says saved him from continuing his pursuit of “femmes fatales.” His memoir’s dedication reads: “To my darling wife Esmahan, my Turkish delight.”
While Lenzi and I sipped the delicious Turkish tea she had brewed for us, I asked her what she thought about her husband’s memoir, which is loaded with tales of onenight stands and affairs with glamorous young women.
“Oh, I love it!” she said. “I really do. It’s beautiful. I’m really impressed.”
As for all those former lovers, she said, “I don’t mind. I never get jealous. That’s what he did before, not now. He’s a wonderful person.”
Lenzi settled in to tell me the story of his life. He began by recalling something that happened when he was about 12. “A good buddy of mine on Wooster Street, where I grew up, had boils that would erupt on his face and make him look very unattractive. He told me, ‘When you go into a store, the cashier smiles and says hello. When I go in, she locks the register.’ I really felt bad for him. I realized: the homely are ignored and the beautiful are adored. It’s the number one discrimination in the world but nobody talks about it.”
“I want to cry sometimes, it’s such an injustice,” he added. “We’re not all created equal.”
Lenzi said he wrote his memoir in part to “make people aware of this discrimination.” He noted, “Tony Curtis and Robert Wagner in their bios never once mentioned that they were good-looking and had that advantage.”
“As I say in my book, I had wonderful opportunities. But I really believe it was only because I happened to be nice looking. I had lots of female friends, lot of male friends, because I was nice looking. If I hadn’t had good looks, I’d probably never have left New Haven.”
In another book Lenzi wrote, “Joe’s Street Smarts: From Soup to Sex, Knowledge Not Taught in College,” he