ISN'T IT WONDERFUL?(Tony Curtis to star in stage version of Some Like It Hot)

From downtown Las Vegas, it takes about twenty minutes, driving on flat, freshly paved, blistering-hot freeways, to reach Tony Curtis's house. To get there, one drives south on Las Vegas Boulevard, escaping the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the Strip, where the persistent jangle of the casinos lingers in the air. Curtis lives in a practically treeless, odorless, sun-blazed suburb called Henderson, with hisdevoted thirty-two-year-old wife, the former Jill Ann VandenBerg, and seven small dogs, including Josephine, a Yorkie that, like the Josephine character Curtis played in Billy Wilder's 1959 movie "Some Like It Hot," is a male. The Curtises also have a couple of cats, including a fluffy white one named Marilyn.

For the past several months, Curtis, who has played more than a hundred and twenty roles in a career that spans fifty years, has been working and rehearsing at home, preparing to go onstage for the first time since he started making movies. He has been cast in the Joe E. Brown role of the old millionaire, Osgood Fielding III, in the forthcoming musical-theatre version of "Some Like It Hot." It will be his singing and dancing debut. Before starting on a twenty-eight-city tour, which will wind up in Portland, Oregon, in about a year, the show is scheduled to open at the new Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, in Houston, on June 4th, one day after Curtis's seventy-seventh birthday.

"I'm going to have a piece of the profits from the show," Curtis said last month, with unconcealed delight. "I like the adventure of it--it means a lot to me." He speaks in a distinctive, rich-throated New Yorkese that moviegoers know well, and he is a bit hard of hearing in one ear. "All those years in movies with gunshots and explosions!" he said. Deeply suntanned, he has a thick, auburn-colored head of hair and is somewhat stouter and fuller of face than he was in his youth; otherwise he exudes the same overeager, innocent, unguarded persona of the characters he played in many of his movies.

The Curtises' house, a white stucco one-story Italian-Spanish ranch, stands on a half acre of precious, water-deprived land. Curtis shows the same undisguised affection for these digs that he shows for just about everything else in his life. He and Jill bought the house last year, had it modified to their specifications, and moved in last summer.

All of the houses in Curtis's colony look similar, arranged in a cozy huddle, but his seems to be the only one that has a front lawn, a four-by-four-foot patch on one side of the entry walk and a six-by-eight-foot patch on the other. The garage holds three convertibles, a canary-colored Porsche (Jill's) and two Trans Ams (Tony's). In the back of the house is a swimming pool, about twenty-five feet long and five feet deep, with a water-replacing vanishing edge. Also squeezed onto the half acre is a small house for the dogs, and an artist's studio for Curtis that is filled with dozens of his paintings, including many in Matisse-like colors and a large brown one of Curtis's hero, Muhammad Ali. In addition to easels, paints, and brushes, and a steadily increasing number of paintings, Curtis regularly creates scores of three-dimensional shadow boxes that he calls "my little touches of memory." Many of the boxes were previously host to cigars. He fills them with whatever odds and ends he can lay his hands on, such as dolls' heads or other toys discarded by his children when they were small. (He had six children, two each from three of his four previous wives, and he now has six grandchildren, whom he unabashedly adores.)

Jill, an accomplished horsewoman, grew up in San Diego. She is almost six feet tall and has straight, baby-blond hair, which she wears cut extremely short. She likes to collect things, too.

"This darling girl's great love is Marilyn Monroe," Curtis said proudly.