I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else Read online

  “Hey, Danny, they’re casting a baseball movie,” Elliot Cuker told me in the summer of 1972. “You ought to go out for it.” Elliot was a charismatic actor who would go on to become one of the world’s foremost collectors of vintage automobiles.

  The movie was Bang the Drum Slowly, released in 1973 and based on Mark Harris’s acclaimed novel. I showed up to the area of Central Park where the casting was taking place. The director, John D. Hancock, put a bat in my hands and had me toss a ball around while I told stories of pro-ball scouts reaching out to me when I was a teenager and playing on the CBS softball team with Phil Rizzuto.

  At the end of that first day of casting, Hancock uttered the magic words. “Okay, you’re on.”

  What did that even mean? I really didn’t understand what part exactly I had been auditioning for in the first place.

  “You’re playing Horse Byrd,” Hancock said.

  “Who’s he in the movie?”

  “He’s a relief pitcher.”

  I was overjoyed. Here I was, with no acting class experience or anything like it ever, and at thirty-nine years old I had been cast in a major motion picture.

  In the original novel and in the first drafts of the screenplay, my character Horse Byrd spent most of his time in the bullpen. “No, no, I want you on the field,” Hancock said after he became more familiar with my ball-playing skills. He reworked the role, and Horse was transformed into a first baseman, primarily because I was one of the only real ballplayers in the cast.

  The plot centers on a dying ballplayer, Bruce Pearson, played by Robert De Niro. Michael Moriarty, whose father played ball on one of the Boston Red Sox farm teams, had the lead as pitcher Henry “Author” Wiggen, Bruce Pearson’s friend. Vincent Gardenia was a comic wonder in his Oscar-nominated role as Dutch Schnell, the cantankerous coach.

  De Niro’s career was just beginning to take off. He had already been involved in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, a Mafia comedy based on the book by the journalist Jimmy Breslin. But it would be 1973’s Bang the Drum Slowly and that same year’s Mean Streets that really put Bobby on the map.

  A lot of the actors involved in Bang the Drum didn’t know a bat from a hole in the wall. De Niro especially had no clue about baseball. I would end up coaching him on some catcher’s moves: how to block a wild pitch, how to dig a ball out of the dirt, stuff like that. Vince Gardenia didn’t know a lot about the game either, or at least he pretended that he didn’t.

  “I want you all to line up along the third-base line!” shouted assistant director Allan Wertheim before one particular scene.

  “Danny,” Vince whispered to me, “which one is third base?”

  Playing the team’s coach, Vince had another scene where he went out on the field to speak to the pitcher. I clued him in on one of the traditional superstitions of baseball. “When you walk back to the dugout from the pitcher’s mound, don’t step on the foul line,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t step on the foul line?” Vince asked, mystified.

  “That’s right,” I said. “The chalk line that runs along the base path? Hop over it instead of stepping on it.”

  I don’t have a clue about where this superstition came from, but I knew it well. Sure enough, in the film, Vince is careful to step over the foul line on his way back to the dugout. It’s a small detail, and one that only a baseball aficionado would pick up on. But it made the role that much more authentic.

  Confident as I was about my knowledge of baseball, I was less sure about my acting. Throughout the shoot, I was always second-guessing myself. I remember being in a corner rehearsing my lines, when Vince asked me what I was so worried about.

  “What if I’m lousy?” I moaned. “If I’m lousy in a movie, it’s bad for all time. If I see the movie fifty times, I’ll see myself suck fifty times.”

  “That’s okay, kid,” he said. “You’ll probably never work again anyway.”

  Vince was most likely kidding, but his words had a sharp edge. It was a reminder that nothing in the world of acting is certain. Out of all the people I worked with on Bang the Drum Slowly, Vincent Gardenia became a lifelong friend.

  Actors always remember their first speaking scene in their debut film. My first one was with Bobby De Niro, who was not bad company for busting my cinematic cherry. The four-word line that is enshrined in my memory? “He always did wonder.”

  Baseball was a thread that ran through my whole life. My involvement in our national pastime gave me the Improv, Lou LaRusso, and Bang the Drum Slowly.

  As I started out in acting, I would have been hard put to list any resources that might help me in my career. I thought I had nothing, but I had baseball. And that made all the difference.

  * * *

  Soon after Bang the Drum hit the movie theaters, Lamppost Reunion came back into my life. The money men had finally come through, and we were headed to Broadway.

  There was laughter and tears over the news. I was elated. Lamppost had turned into a real acting job, and even more important, I was going to get paid. We had done the showcase run at the Churchyard for lunch money. By contrast, a Broadway production paid standard salaries. Wages were set by Actors’ Equity, and every performer had to be compensated. Those of us who weren’t in the union—that was four out of five—would join.

  It didn’t matter that I had no idea what I was doing. I would get an Equity salary for acting! I was on my way.

  After one month of rehearsal, we were scheduled to open at the Little Theatre on West Forty-Fourth Street, only a block away from the Improv. Today the venue has been renamed the Helen Hayes Theatre. Then as now, it sat on hallowed ground—right next door was Sardi’s, the most celebrated Theater District restaurant of them all.

  When we had been rehearsing for two weeks, we were asked to report to the office for a meeting, where it was announced to the cast that the director and J. J. Barry, the lead, had been fired. The two most important people responsible for our reaching Broadway, gone! None of us in the cast knew what the hell to say.

  There was an actor who hung out at the Improv, someone who had been in the profession for a long time. I had shared the screen with him on Bang the Drum Slowly. He had been coming to watch us rehearse. We’d nicknamed him “the Shadow,” because he was always there. No one thought anything of it. If there was something wrong with his being there, I would have been the last to know. I didn’t understand anything about show business rules and traditions.

  Lo and behold, with the original director and J. J. now out of the building, one of the producers introduced our new director—the Shadow. He came onto the stage with a smile on his face, as if he believed we would greet him with open arms. What we all should’ve done then was leave the production immediately.

  The feeling of betrayal was complete. We had gone through hell to get to Broadway, and I have never forgiven myself for not walking out of the fucking theater in solidarity with J. J. and the director.

  The Shadow made a little speech, telling us that J. J.’s replacement was a good friend of his from California, Gabriel Dell, formerly one of the Dead End Kids. Gabe greeted the cast as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He simply thought he was an actor coming in from the West Coast to do a part on Broadway.

  I found out later that the cast member who had the connection to the Rhode Island backers was responsible for the conspiracy. He was able to engineer the firings and planted his friend the Shadow at the rehearsals. All along, the Shadow had been watching the original director with the intention of replacing him.

  But what goes around comes around. We were in previews when it happened, before the show formally opened.

  Walking up the backstage stairs on my way to begin the second act, I passed two guys I had never seen before. My street sense told me immediately what they were.

  Sure enough, they started to beat the shit out of one of actors, working him over with blackjacks. I assumed this guy was somehow disrupting the show, and now that the money boys ha
d invested in it, they were getting serious about not letting him fuck things up. Of course, this was New York, so it could have been something else entirely.

  At the opening of the second act, the actor was supposed to emerge from the barroom’s toilet, behind a door, stage right. At the cue, I turned to react to his entrance. The door opened, and out came his replacement instead—the Shadow. Talk about changing horses in midstream: this was changing actors mid-play!

  This kind of double-dealing was familiar to me from the streets of the Bronx. Somehow, I thought Broadway would be more civilized, but I was wrong. From the start, I guess I should have felt right at home in the theater.

  Lamppost finally opened on Broadway on October 16, 1975. In an irony of ironies, the Shadow, who had the advantage of all of the original director’s insights into the direction of the play, received a Tony nomination for it.

  I was building on my collaboration with Lou LaRusso. The next year, I did Lou’s Wheelbarrow Closers, another showcase that wound up going to the Great White Way, opening at the Bijou on October 11, 1976. All the cast members in Lou’s plays were now being talked about in the theater community. It was as though we were part of a new, different breed of actor.

  Broadway wasn’t through with me yet. The next play I was cast in went on to become the biggest hit of the season.

  Chapter Twelve

  Gemini

  My birthday is June 20, meaning my astrological sign is Gemini. Though I don’t even follow my daily horoscope, it does strike me as remarkable that a play of the same title boosted my stage career to a whole new level.

  Gemini was the product of a young Yale-educated playwright named Albert Innaurato. His producers had seen me in Lamppost. They cast me as the blue-collar Italian father Fran Geminiani, which was very close to the character I had played in Lamppost Reunion. I almost didn’t accept the part, as I didn’t want to play a forty-year-old father. My delayed start to an acting career already made me feel older than the other actors around me.

  “Sure, Fran is forty,” Albert said, trying to convince me to take the role. “But, Danny, he still thinks of himself as a nineteen-year-old.” That made sense to me, because I felt the same way. I reconsidered and took the role.

  Gemini was a crazy kind of comic opera, featuring a woman who climbs telephone poles in an overstuffed costume, a four-hundred-pound boy who flies around on his scooter in pajamas, and my character’s son, Francis, whose sexual orientation is ambiguous. The Geminiani family is not quite sure what he is, but they’re hoping for the best.

  The entire play takes place in the backyard of the family’s South Philadelphia home, around a table where the family members and their guests eat, with gusto and enthusiasm. My character’s wife, Lucille, was played by Anne De Salvo, and she picks food from the plates of others. This impolite habit prompts my character to throw an entire pot of spaghetti at Lucille. Night after night. I had fun. I’m sure Anne didn’t.

  The Geminiani family backyard was like hellzapoppin’, with characters ducking and weaving through the food-fight crossfire. The kids in the play were terrific: Robert Picardo (who would go on to a supporting role in Star Trek: Voyager), Reed Birney, Jonathan Hadary, and Carol Potter.

  Gemini had me serving up spaghetti and meatballs eight times a week, matinees and nightly performances included. I didn’t cook the food myself; the producers had it brought in from Mamma Leone’s, the famous Theater District red-sauce restaurant. I wouldn’t have been able to eat it so often if it wasn’t from a quality kitchen.

  After an out-of-town trial in Huntington, New York, we opened Gemini off-Broadway in March 1977, downtown in Greenwich Village at Circle Rep. Audiences loved it. I discovered there’s nothing quite like being onstage in a comedy when laughter threatens to bring down the house. But it wasn’t only that Gemini was funny. It also perfectly matched the mood of the times. The gay pride movement was really ramping up during that period.

  As she always did, my wife, Sandy, came to see the show at Circle Rep on opening night in March 1977. She wanted to meet the wonderful Jessica James, who was terrific as Bunny Weinberger, the telephone-pole-climbing nutcase. After the performance, I told Sandy to go ahead and visit Jessica in her dressing room.

  Sandy is always very unassuming, and she didn’t know a lot about show business, despite hearing some of the ins and outs through me. When she knocked on Jessica’s door, it swung open to reveal the actress without a stitch of clothing on, and Jessica remained that way for what felt like an eternity to Sandy. My embarrassed wife stood there talking up at the ceiling for about five minutes, never once looking directly at Jessica.

  Carol Potter’s understudy was a twenty-three-year-old beauty named Kathleen Turner. She was doing a soap in New York at the time. Kathleen was in every way a very alluring young woman, full of laughter and smarts. In the play’s concluding scene, two boys and a girl run to catch the train back to school. My character is there to send them off. During one performance, when Kathleen the understudy had stepped in to play the role, I kissed her good-bye.

  It was the most normal thing in the world, a stage kiss, a father bidding farewell to one of his son’s friends. It was supposed to be a peck on the cheek. That night, Albert Innaurato thought I had made it into something a little bit more with Kathleen. He came running backstage, screaming but not really angry. He always spoke in exclamation points.

  “This is a different play!” he said, raising his forefinger in the air like offended royalty. “This is not the one I wrote! In my play, the son runs away with the girl, not the father!”

  The whole cast broke up. Incidents like that happened every night. Unpredictability, in my opinion, makes for beautiful theater. Gemini played to waves of laughter.

  Two months after we opened at Circle Rep, in May 1977, the play headed uptown to the Little Theatre, the same venue where we had opened Lamppost Reunion. For the third play in a row, a small, limited-run production I appeared in was moving to Broadway. Theater people are superstitious. It didn’t hurt that they began to believe my presence in the cast worked like a good-luck charm.

  Broadway is like a gauntlet for egos. The critics line up and take their whacks as you pass by. But the reviews for Gemini were ecstatic. Albert’s play became a huge hit, eventually running for four years.

  I won an Obie for my performance. To appear in a hit on Broadway, to receive a prestigious acting award for my part in it—what could be better?

  Naturally, I decided to leave the play.

  * * *

  No one guided my moves in the early part of my acting career. I was like a blind man feeling my way around. I didn’t know how things were done, so I operated on a gut level. I ditched a Broadway hit simply because I didn’t want people to believe that I couldn’t get another job. I also didn’t want to be associated with a single character, Fran Geminiani. I didn’t want to be typecast. I wanted producers to understand that I could play something other than an Italian father.

  Looking back, my logic didn’t make that much sense. But I was new to the theater game and had no grasp of how rare it was to land a part in a smash play. Up until then, almost everything I touched had turned to Broadway gold. Actors would kill to enjoy the success I had. I turned my back on it because, basically, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

  The odd thing was, my presence in the cast of Gemini continued long after I left. We had filmed a TV ad for the play that aired continually on local television. I was prominently featured, delivering my trademark line: “This is gonna be suummm party!” Fans would stop me on the street and ask me to say it. There came a point where I didn’t want to disappoint them by noting I was no longer in the play. The TV spot turned into a zombie ad, giving my performance as Fran a life after death.

  By the late 1970s, another appearance of mine had taken on a life of its own as well. Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather saga was a huge critical and commercial success, with both the original and the sequel winning Academy Awards
for Best Picture. I had a brief but memorable role in The Godfather: Part II. I had only a few lines, but one stood out that would be identified with me long afterward.

  I never knew how I came to Coppola’s attention. Perhaps Carmine Caridi recommended me for the role of the thug hit man Tony Rosato. Another possibility is that one of the producers of the film, Gray Frederickson, used to frequent the Improv and could have noticed me there. Whatever the reason, I didn’t audition for the part. I never even met Coppola until I was on the set.

  The original script had me in two scenes. One got edited out of the final cut, but the other appearance made it in. I was to come up behind actor Michael Gazzo, who was playing Corleone underboss Frankie “Five Angels” Pentangeli. My character would perform a classic Mafia hit, garroting Pentangeli, making him another casualty of a large-scale mob war.

  “Okay, let’s rehearse it,” Coppola called out.

  Technically, it was a difficult scene. I had to appear as if I were violently lifting Gazzo from his chair with the cord I had wrapped around his neck. I wanted to make very sure I wasn’t hurting him. The prop crew had rigged a harness for Gazzo, so I lifted him up not by the garrote, as it appeared on film, but with the hidden harness. I had to hold it and look as if I was tightening the cord at the same time.

  We rehearsed the scene, and it went off without a hitch. But I ended up ad-libbing a line during the strangulation.

  “What was that you said?” Coppola asked after the run-through.

  I hesitated. I didn’t know if I was in trouble with Coppola for improvising.

  “What was it?” he asked again.

  “I think I said, ‘Michael Corleone says hello.’ ”

  Coppola considered this for a brief moment. “That’s good,” he said. “Keep it in.”

  With cameras rolling, we did the scene again, and I hissed out the same line. As the movie gained in reputation, that improvised four-word phrase came back to haunt me. Fans started to quote it to me on the street. “Hey, Danny,” they’d call out, “Michael Corleone says hello.” The line has stayed with me all the way through to today. On the Internet, aficionados still debate its meaning.