You don't usually think of a shoeshine as an audition opportunity. But that's how Tony Curtis got his start, he told an audience of 100 or so fans in Huntington Friday night.

"The Depression prepared me to be an actor," he said. "On the streets of Manhattan at age 7 or 8, if I acted hungrier than the next kid, someone would put his foot up and I'd get the shoeshine. It's the same in getting a part."

Of course, his radiant good looks didn't hurt. "I was a handsome kid," he didn't mind admitting. "People like good-looking people."

Some Hollywood actresses, he recalled, were his leading ladies in life before they were on the screen. "Marilyn and I went together when I moved to California ," he said of Marilyn Monroe .

Of his fellow leading men - among them Cary Grant and Jack Lemmon - Curtis was asked about Sidney Poitier and their 1958 film, "The Defiant Ones." "In those days," he said, "black actors didn't get their name above the title. I told them, if Sidney doesn't get equal billing with me, I'm not doing the picture."