I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else Page 11

  Although the Godfather films are cinematic classics, it doesn’t take anything away from Coppola to say that both movies present a highly romanticized view of the Mafia. The language and the truth of the characters are nothing that I recognize from my life on the streets. Real mobsters never talked the way Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro spoke in the films. Coppola portrayed the mob as viewed through rose-colored camera lenses.

  * * *

  My work on Lamppost Reunion had benefited me in a lot of different ways. A theatrical agent named Richard Astor came to the showcase during its off-Broadway run at the Churchyard Playhouse. When theatrical professionals and moneymen see the play and actors in showcases, good things are supposed to happen.

  That’s not often the way it turns out, but with Lamppost Reunion, I wound up getting proper representation. Richard Astor saw something in me long before I had an established body of work. After all, my New York theater experience consisted of a single play, and a limited-run showcase, at that. It took guts for Richard to follow his instincts and take a chance on me.

  Richard’s company, the Astor Agency, had a small office on Fifty-Seventh Street and Broadway. He represented a lot of actors, including Robert Duvall and Martin Sheen before they broke big. They became A-list after they left him, but he was the one who helped them on their way.

  In 1975, Richard set me up with a part that would change my life. He let me know that Woody Allen was involved in a movie, a rare project that Woody would act in but not write or direct. It was called The Front, and it dealt with the dark days of the Hollywood blacklist. Walter Bernstein, who had been blacklisted in 1950, wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay. The director was Martin Ritt, who made the film version of The Great White Hope, as well as Hombre, starring Paul Newman.

  I met Woody for the first time with Martin Ritt at the film’s production office. In The Front, Woody plays a lowly theater cashier deep in debt with gamblers, who to make extra cash serves as a front man for blacklisted writers. Ritt told me that I would play Danny LaGattuta, a bookie for Woody’s character. The part was not a large one.

  No rehearsal, no audition. Many times, an initial meeting with a show business professional would simply be a test as to whether you might be a pain in the ass, might have bad personal hygiene, or were in some other way unsuitable for the job. At this stage of my career, my parts came in a limited variety of flavors. I was a bartender, a bookie, or a father. In The Front, I appeared in only a few scenes, but my involvement in the film turned out to be vital for me later on.

  Woody Allen would remember me. Down the line, I would encounter the mystery of his hot-and-cold personality. I would also have to endure major heartbreak in our professional relationship before it bore fruit. I could never say that The Front was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But it was certainly the beginning of what would be some of the highest achievements of my acting career.

  Around this time, Richard Astor got me my first television gigs. I had a strange animosity toward the whole idea of TV. I was a child of the movies, born into a world where the silver screen was the most popular form of entertainment. We plunked down good money to see movies—although, truth be told, I didn’t always pay.

  When TV came around, I remember everyone saying that this new medium would replace film. I hated hearing that, because so much of my life was wrapped up in the movies. I never felt the same emotional connection watching TV in my living room as I did in the darkness of a movie theater.

  My master plan, such as it was, was never to go into television. I didn’t consider it real acting. I was biased against TV right from the start. I took the roles that were offered to me not to further my career but to keep my family’s head above water.

  Producers offered me roles on cop shows such as Kojak and The Andros Targets. I did a TV movie called Lady Blue that spun off into a full series. Jamie Rose played the lead, and we shot a season’s worth of episodes in Chicago.

  Throughout the late seventies and early eighties, TV was the Aiello family’s bread and butter. It kept me a busy boy. Gemini came back into my life as a TV movie, where I acted alongside Sheree North and Scott Baio. I had a turn as a master of ceremonies in a skit on Saturday Night Live. I did a TV pilot based on the hit movie Car Wash.

  I would eventually appear on every TV talk show there was, with Tom Snyder and Charlie Rose being my personal favorites. In contrast to shows that focused on always getting the laugh, their programs were more like warm conversations among good friends.

  My family only slowly came around to understanding that my acting career was more than just a passing whim. Sandy and I rarely discussed it with the children. Her support was simply part of her character, being a strong, loyal wife, always in my corner. Truth be told, however, she would have probably rather had a more conventional lifestyle, with a man whose work did not require travel all the time, one who remained home where she could keep an eye on him.

  I tried to be as understanding as I could. After a two-month stretch shooting in Chicago on Lady Blue, living in an efficiency apartment and keeping in touch with Sandy mainly via the telephone, I decided to award my wife with a token of my affection. I purchased a brand-new black Pontiac Grand Am and drove it home. I parked the gorgeous vehicle out in front of our house and put a big red ribbon on it. She loved the surprise. A new car represented a concrete sign that my career as an actor was solid and reliable.

  Sandy would occasionally join me when I was doing shows out of town. During this period she first earned her nickname “Sandy Sheets,” since my wife always traveled with her own linens. She refused to lay her head on a hotel pillow or use the linens provided. Many times I would find myself on one side of the bed with her cocooned in her own sheets on the other. Needless to say, this arrangement made intimacy a little problematic.

  At first, my boys were pretty reserved about my newfound celebrity as a TV actor. As time went on, though, they began to take advantage of it, as kids will. My daughter, Stacey, was different. She was genuinely embarrassed by it all, being extremely shy and not looking for any kind of notoriety.

  “Class,” Stacey’s teacher said one day in the fall of 1980, “there’s a film on television that is required viewing.” It was an ABC Afterschool Special called A Family of Strangers, about a widower who remarries and must raise his own two daughters along with the daughter of his new wife. The subject of blended families was causing a lot of public discussion back then. I would go on to win a daytime Emmy for my work on the movie.

  Stacey didn’t let out a peep at school about my participation in A Family of Strangers. Her classmates had to watch the drama to find out that her father was the star of the movie that their teacher had assigned as homework. My daughter endured all the attention only after the fact.

  “Why didn’t you just tell them?” I asked her.

  “Daddy, I didn’t want them to think that I was something special,” she said.

  Because I started acting so late in my life—thirty-six years old for my first play, forty for my first film release—I used to lie a lot about my age, knocking a few years off from the truth.

  In show business, producers always seem to think you might be too old for whatever part you’re up for. It’s as if they’re trying to get rid of you as quickly as they can and shuffle you off into the retirement home. It was a never-ending battle, with producers adding on the years and actors subtracting them. I kept lying about my age. It got to be ridiculous when various media outlets cited different numbers.

  Finally, my oldest son, Rick, called me to account: “Dad, you keep this up, in a couple years I’m going to be older than you are.”

  The job of acting is rarely a steady one. You work, you’re unemployed, you work, you’re unemployed again. The obligation of having to support a family had once forced me to do terrible things like stealing. So I could live with telling a few white lies about how old I was in order to land an acting job.

  In the meantime, my work
in TV represented a strictly practical endeavor. I may not have been a fan of television, but it sure beat robbing cigarette machines in the middle of the night.

  * * *

  A lot of fans believe that celebrity actors chum around with each other all the time. If you’ve acted in a movie together, the idea is that you’re friends for life. With most actors I’ve worked with, our relationship was close only while the specific project lasted. I would see someone every day for a ten-week shoot, then rarely stay in touch, with each of us retreating into his private, personal world.

  I would never claim that I’m a close friend of Robert De Niro. But during the period when he and I worked together on Bang the Drum Slowly, he came over a few times to my apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. An actor like De Niro is a sponge, always observing people around him, soaking up local accents and personal quirks.

  I recognized myself in one of Bobby’s most famous movie lines. When I was younger, if I was facing off with some bullshit guy in the neighborhood, I would put a sneer in my voice and ask, “You talking to me?” Then my wife and I saw Taxi Driver, with De Niro uttering the same phrase. We looked at each other and Sandy whispered, “Danny, he’s doing you!” De Niro could have just as well picked it up from the street himself, but it does make me wonder.

  In 1973, after Bobby and I appeared together in Bang the Drum Slowly, I got a call from the offices of movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis. A writer there, Pete Savage, invited me up to the Gulf and Western building on Columbus Circle. Back then, Gulf and Western owned Paramount Pictures.

  Dino De Laurentiis and Paramount were big-time. I couldn’t figure out why they would bother with me. I had hardly any credits to my name.

  I met with Pete Savage and a producer named Ralph Serpe. They had a great project, Savage said. “You know who Jake LaMotta is?” he asked.

  I was a boxing fan. Of course I knew who Jake LaMotta was.

  “Along with another writer, Joe Carter, I did a book with LaMotta,” Savage said. “It’s his life story. He calls it Raging Bull.”

  De Laurentiis was developing a script based on the LaMotta autobiography. My heart leaped. I conjured up visions of playing Jake LaMotta, the legendary “Bronx Bull” of boxing, who was a madman in the ring and out of it.

  Savage quickly disabused me of the notion. Sure, there was a part for me, but not the lead. Eventually I realized that Savage, Serpe, and De Laurentiis were trying to get to Robert De Niro through me. Bobby was hotter than hot due to his work in Bang the Drum and Mean Streets. If I could get the Raging Bull book to De Niro, Savage said, Bobby could do a great job as Jake LaMotta.

  De Niro knew as much about boxing as he did about baseball, but the movie would be less a fight film than a character study. If Hollywood ever remade Somebody Up There Likes Me, one of my all-time favorites, starring Paul Newman, Bobby would be the natural choice to play Rocky Graziano.

  Savage gave me the Raging Bull book, which I read. LaMotta’s life made for great drama, and Savage presented the story in a straightforward, easily understandable way. On one of the evenings that Bobby came over to our apartment, I told him I had something for him.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” I said, uncertain how to proceed. “Some guys gave me a book for you. You know who Jake LaMotta is?”

  Bobby didn’t. I told him that LaMotta won the world middleweight crown in 1949. Then I recounted details of my meetings with Serpe and Savage.

  “I don’t want to play a boxer,” De Niro said. But after encouragement from me, he agreed to read the book.

  From that point on, Pete Savage repeatedly invited me back to the Gulf and Western offices. “How’s it going with Bobby?” he kept asking. Ralph Serpe lavished attention on me also. It was the first time I had been romanced by a studio. Paramount certainly had all the techniques to turn an actor’s head. The courting went on for months.

  Then, suddenly, nothing. The connection went dead, and all the phone calls and invites stopped. I could never reach Savage or Serpe or anyone else at Paramount. It became apparent that I couldn’t have gotten into that office if I had a key.

  Bobby was pretty much out of my life by that time. We would work together again, but not for a while. He was in Italy preparing himself for The Godfather: Part II, playing a young Vito Corleone in what would be an Oscar-winning role for him. He wanted to meet Italians from the turn of the century to pick up their speech patterns.

  As I said, relationships between actors are a temporary sort of thing. Outside of a movie set, I have seen Bobby De Niro maybe twenty times over the course of my life. Show business friendships are formed quickly but often are not sustainable. De Niro might have gotten me my first answering service and recommended a financial adviser, but we weren’t exactly buddies.

  I slowly pieced together what had happened via the rumor mill. As far as the LaMotta project went, Dino De Laurentiis was out and the producer partnership of Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler was in. On top of that, director Martin Scorsese had come along with the new producers.

  At the end of the seventies, when Scorsese finally got his production financing together and started to cast Raging Bull, I did indeed get a call to come by his office.

  Bobby was there. Marty offered me what was essentially the part of an extra, a bodyguard role with no lines. I didn’t expect Bobby to intercede on my behalf, because he always had a strict professional rule never to interfere with a director’s vision. As far as he was concerned, it was all up to Marty.

  At the time I was doing Knockout on Broadway and I was feeling pretty good about myself. I thought that my career had advanced beyond a role with no lines.

  Scorsese had made me his offer. I thanked him and left.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Knockout

  Boxing wasn’t through with me yet. At the end of the seventies, playwright Lou LaRusso wanted to work with me again. At first, Lou and I kicked around the prospect of doing an Elvis Presley character, but the more we spoke about it, the more the idea began to feel a little stale.

  I knew LaRusso’s gritty, working-class style of drama. “How about an over-the-hill boxer?” I suggested.

  I had a friend at the time, Anthony Conforti, who entertained me with stories of a cousin of his who kept fighting long after he should have quit the ring. Sly Stallone’s Rocky had been a huge hit, so I felt as though Broadway audiences would be open to a down-and-dirty play about a boxer. I put Lou and Tony Conforti together, Lou filled out the story of Tony’s cousin, and we were on our way.

  Lou called his new play Knockout. I played the lead, an aging, gentle-minded fighter named Damie Ruffino. The set included a regulation boxing ring erected onstage. Just as my experience with baseball got me a part in Bang the Drum Slowly, my boxing chops set me up well for Knockout. With Lou as playwright and Tony Conforti as associate producer, we had the great good luck to connect with Hollywood showman H. William Sargent.

  Bill Sargent was a Texan wild man who had made a fortune in electronics. He would go on to pioneer pay-per-view and closed-circuit events for television. To give you an idea of Bill’s style, he once proposed a closed-circuit battle in a swimming pool that pitted a human diver against a great white shark.

  Broadway productions are difficult and audiences are fickle, but our producer Bill simply never said die. He loved the play and backed it to the hilt, paying his actors a living wage. I made $3,000 a week, which I’m sure at times sent the production into the red. Eventually, Bill sank almost a million dollars into the play.

  Knockout became one of the most difficult projects I was ever involved with. In six weeks, I lost thirty-five pounds to get in shape to fight eight shows a week, with ninety-eight punches thrown in each show. Believe me, I counted. We landed real blows, not fake pulled punches as had been the rule in other boxing stage plays. I wanted to make sure the audience heard the sound of fist to flesh.

  Eddie O’Neill, soon to become well-known as the lead of the hit TV show Married
with Children, played my bullying opponent, Paddy Klonski. The boxing was choreographed, of course, but that didn’t stop Eddie and me from kicking each other’s ass every performance.

  Putting the play together was not easy. Director Frank Corsaro was more accustomed to staging operas. I don’t think he had ever attended a boxing event in his life. He felt Knockout was a great challenge for him. In the mid-fifties, Corsaro had made his name directing A Hatful of Rain on Broadway with a cast that included Anthony Franciosa, Ben Gazzara, Harry Guardino, Henry Silva, Shelley Winters, and an understudy named Steve McQueen.

  Corsaro concentrated on helping the cast to talk, while I helped them to box. The fight blocking, in and out of the ring, was done by my son Danny III. The light heavyweight champion of the world, Jose Torres, was responsible for my training.

  Because my character was an over-the-hill boxer, I had to get in shape and at the same time look as though I wasn’t in shape. I never worked so hard in my life. Knockout ran for an entire year. Throughout that time, I did not miss a single performance. Training meant hitting the gym, sparring, running through the streets of New York City. My friends barely recognized me. “Is that you, Danny?” fans would yell. “No!” I’d respond. “I’m just a reasonable facsimile.”

  On opening night, my entire family attended, all dressed to the nines: Sandy; my three sons, Rick, Danny, and Jaime; my daughter, Stacey; and my mother, Frances.

  By then, my mom was legally blind from glaucoma, so she was given a seat in the front row. Mom had been to three Broadway shows before this and I was in each one of them. It didn’t surprise me when, in the middle of my performance, I could clearly hear Mom talking to another member of the audience.