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

  Up to that point, Danny III had not had an easy time in life. In his youth, he had been fragile and often hospitalized. Like his dad, he never enjoyed school, asking his teachers if he could sit in the back of the classroom.

  A guidance counselor called my wife into school to speak about Danny’s problems. He refused to participate in any class activities, the counselor told Sandy. Danny balked when asked to read or spell a word. He would shut down, put his hands over his ears as if he didn’t want to hear anything.

  Sandy and I didn’t seem to be able to help the situation. We punished him at home. That made things worse. He went into a shell. It was hard to talk to him.

  I began to search in my own past for answers. I hadn’t enjoyed school that much, either. But I loved to get up and read or become involved in a spelling bee in front of the whole class. These activities were distractions from the childhood illnesses that were bothering me.

  It turned out that my son had similar issues. A different illness, but the same result. Danny III was afflicted with a hidden syndrome that made it difficult for him in school. A therapist finally diagnosed my son with dyslexia. The syndrome was not well-known at the time. The therapist described how Danny would visualize words differently than other children. He would see the letters backward or in jumbles.

  Psychologically, dyslexia could be devastating. Now I understood why he wouldn’t read out loud. It broke my heart to realize that he considered himself stupid or backward. He wasn’t. His problems had a medical basis. Danny was diagnosed with dyslexia in fifth grade. He was held back a year as a result, just as I had been when I missed school due to illness. It was as though my son’s childhood was paralleling my own.

  Danny was a shy, introverted young boy. His brother Rick once told me that if the two of them got in trouble and were running away, he would have to go back and help him over whatever fences they had to climb. I thought sports would bring Danny out of his shell, as it did for me when I was a kid. I got him into playing Little League ball. To succeed in athletics, you’ve got to be at least a little bit aggressive. At that age, even though he played, Danny tended to be more passive than not.

  But as he grew into a teenager, the toughness came out in him. He was a standout football player at Kennedy High School in the Bronx. Danny learned how to battle his way out of difficulties with his fists. He soon came to be considered one of the hardest-hitting kids on the street. Later on, I was told of an incident where a neighborhood boy put a rifle to Danny’s head.

  “I’m going to shoot you,” the kid said.

  “Go ahead and shoot,” Danny said calmly. “Shoot if you got the balls.” The kid took off running. At that point in time, my own head must have been in the sand, or I was too busy trying to make money, because I had no idea that any of this was going on. My youngest son, Jaime, told me that no one would mess with him as a child because all the kids lived in fear of his older brother Danny.

  Like his father, Danny dropped out of high school. Like his father, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Unlike his father, he received not an honorable but a general discharge, being deemed “not adaptable” by the military authorities. Washing a soldier out was the way the army dealt with conditions it didn’t understand, like dyslexia.

  Just as I did, Danny discovered his true self on a film set. His visits to the Fort Apache set in the spring of 1980 changed Danny III’s life.

  I played a very bad cop in the movie. My character, Morgan, is a psychopath in blue. The entire plot and my role in it bothered me, as I’m very pro-police. I thought this kind of film might set the reputation of the NYPD back fifty years. But I was finally able to rationalize Morgan in my own mind as a cop who should never have been on the force.

  In the film, tension boils up between Morgan and his lieutenant, Murphy, played by Paul Newman. The two of us get into a full-on sidewalk brawl outside a local bar. My son was on set the nights that we filmed the fight.

  The director, Dan Petrie, called me over. “Would it be okay if we use your son as your double?”

  “Sure,” I said. “If he doesn’t mind, I don’t mind.”

  I didn’t realize right away what Petrie had planned. My son was around the same height as me and had the same broad-shouldered build. Doubles and stand-ins are of course used all the time in movies. The lengthy lighting and prop setups require a warm body to take the place of the actors involved.

  But the director wasn’t talking about using Danny merely as a stand-in. He proposed that my son would stunt-double for me, which is a whole different thing. Stand-ins are inactive, but stunt doubles perform actions that at times involve a degree of risk. I didn’t know whether or not I wanted my son to engage in film work at all, much less as a stuntman.

  Danny was all for it, and one look at his eager face made me agree to the whole proposition. Vic Magnotta, the stunt coordinator on the film, would make sure that my son wouldn’t be exposed to any physical harm. Vic told him what he had to do. Danny III would show-punch, grab, and wrestle with Paul Newman in all the long shots.

  “Your father is with him in all the close shots,” Vic said. “The audience will always know that Paul is fighting your father.”

  The scene turned out to be one of the best staged movie fights I have ever been involved in. On-screen, it looks as if real blows are being exchanged. When you’re watching it, depending on the camera angle, you’re seeing a member of the Aiello family, either father or son, battling it out with Hud.

  From that day forward, Danny Aiello III was a stuntman. Vic Magnotta (who eventually died during a stunt on the set of the 1987 comedy The Squeeze, starring Michael Keaton) served as his mentor and friend. Danny doubled me in Fort Apache, the Bronx, as well as Hudson Hawk, Do the Right Thing, 29th Street, Ruby, and others. But he didn’t limit himself to working on my movies; he went on to become a top stunt coordinator with more than three hundred films to his name. He also acted in movies such as The Wanderers, Miller’s Crossing, and Good Morning, Vietnam.

  Appearing in Robert Redford’s baseball movie, The Natural, Danny III wore number twelve and played a first baseman, my same uniform number and position in Bang the Drum Slowly, over ten years before. It was just a wonderful coincidence, but I took it as a good omen.

  * * *

  Paul Newman had a wicked sense of humor. He used to mess around with me constantly during the shoot. Whenever I was on camera and he wasn’t, he’d make faces, stick his finger up his nose, cross his eyes, anything to make me crack up. Of course, when he was on camera, I returned the favor.

  The film turned out to be not all fun and games. Controversy arose over the project. The people who lived in the neighborhood were upset over the very concept of the movie, certain that it would portray their home turf in a negative way. In a sense, they were right. Fort Apache was certainly a warts-and-all portrayal of the South Bronx. Keeping it real were a couple of real police officers from the Four-One, Tommy Mulhearn and Pete Tessitore, who were on the set all the time as consultants.

  Activists and rabble-rousers got involved, fanning the flames with legal threats. Reality began to imitate art. There were actors and extras portraying the antipolice rioters who figured in the plot. At the same time, Fort Apache protestors were agitating against the film, and the hostility spiraled out of control.

  I was thinking about asking for hazard pay. The troublemakers would get up onto the roofs, just as we did in my days back with the Kingsmen, and toss shit down at the film crew. One afternoon, a porcelain toilet came flying from several stories up to smash into a thousand pieces on the sidewalk, right next to the set. Dan Petrie took it all in stride. He immediately incorporated a flying toilet tossed off a roof into the action of the movie.

  The situation came to a head when it was time for Petrie to shoot the movie’s riot scene. The chaos we attempted to reproduce on the set was mirrored by the chaos on the real streets. It got to be difficult to tell who was an extra and who was a protestor.

  I pulled my s
on aside. “All the people rioting here are not actors,” I warned him. “Some of them have guns. I’ve lived in this neighborhood. Maybe one of these fuckers will start shooting.”

  He took my advice and watched his back at all times. I was just worried that we wouldn’t be able to tell a prop pistol from a real one. After the craziness on the set, I judged myself lucky to get out of my old neighborhood alive.

  But disappointment lay in wait for me once the shooting wrapped, in the guise of another lesson about the film business. When I saw the finished cut of the movie, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  I immediately composed a fiery letter to Alan Ladd Jr., the studio head at 20th Century Fox. Writing it wasn’t so bad, but what was stupid was that I actually sent it. I constructed the character of Morgan carefully, I wrote. Only a sick man would do what he did. The scenes that were cut were like the lower rungs of a ladder. When they were removed, there was no way to climb to the top. All my hard work collapsed. The character no longer made sense.

  I cited a removed bit where Morgan reacted with spite to an offer for help from Newman’s character, as well as another edited-out scene where the audience glimpsed the lonely man’s cluttered, filthy apartment. In my mind, these scenes established Morgan as a mentally ill individual.

  Needless to say, I didn’t receive a response from Alan Ladd. My well-rounded portrait of Morgan the insane cop went by the wayside. I felt I had done an oil painting, and what was in the final cut of the movie was merely a pencil sketch.

  I thought that between the editing job and the ill-advised letter, I had destroyed any impact I would make with Fort Apache, but I was wrong. The film was a solid hit that boosted my visibility in Hollywood considerably.

  * * *

  Sandy and I had already moved out of the Bronx altogether the year before the Fort Apache shoot. For the first time in my life, I was living outside of New York City. I was finally earning enough money to purchase a small home in a middle-class area of Ramsey, New Jersey. The corner property at number four Thornhill Drive came complete with a beautiful white picket fence.

  We had lived in apartments all our lives, so to some degree the new place represented a dream come true. But my anxieties moved right in with me. Having a mortgage payment every month is never easy for anyone, but it’s doubly hard for someone in a catch-as-catch-can industry like show business.

  For most actors, the wait between gigs can be an awful long one. There are a lot of people in the business and not enough work to go around. That’s why 70 percent of Screen Actors Guild members make $3,000 a year or less. You have to be consistently very lucky to be among the 30 percent. The situation is even worse for Equity union members, who work in theater.

  So of course, I was always hustling for another acting gig, leaving no stone unturned. A few years after my Annie Hall disappointment, and hard on the heels of Fort Apache, Woody Allen reached out to me again.

  This time, he cast me not in one of his movies but in a play: The Floating Light Bulb. He wrote this comedy of childhood reminiscence himself but called upon Belgian-born Ulu Grosbard to direct. Ulu had numerous awards and nominations under his belt and worked in theater and movies both. Since it would be a live performance, there was no danger of my work being once again left on the cutting room floor, as it had been with Morgan on Fort Apache. The only danger would be getting fired from the play.

  Woody had a hands-off approach to the production, which was to open at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in the spring of 1981. He didn’t interfere with Ulu’s direction. He just sat in the back of the hall during rehearsals, reading a copy of the New York Times, holding the paper in a way that shielded his face.

  Occasionally, the actors on the stage, myself included, would see him lower the newspaper slightly, peer briefly at us over the top of it, then duck down and go back to his reading. Most of the time, the cast members didn’t even know someone was sitting out there in the darkness of the rehearsal hall.

  I had little interaction with him during the production. But when I gave a performance that Woody thought was special, he slipped an encouraging note under the door of my dressing room. Some were brief jottings on scraps of paper: “Danny, you were great tonight, Woody.”

  Others were written on his odd brown-paper-bag stationery. He delivered one on opening night, after a week of previews: “Danny—Good luck. I think you’re a great actor—now if we can only get you to believe it. Woody.”

  The Floating Light Bulb had a successful run and was a blast to act in. But to me, acting in the play was personally important because I got to know Bea Arthur, who remained a dear friend to me forever afterward and had one of the warmest hearts of anyone I ever met.

  Throughout the seventies, Bea had starred in one of the top sitcoms of the day, Maude, a spin-off of the popular show All in the Family. Audiences loved her, and she was a major factor in what made The Floating Light Bulb such a hit. I already knew Bea as a wonderful comedic actress, but I soon found out she was no one to mess around with. She was the consummate professional and took her acting very seriously.

  As I sat in my dressing room during one of my offstage moments, I could hear the action onstage via the intercom. One evening during previews, a scene between Jack Weston and Bea was in progress. The two of them were taking no prisoners that night. They were killing, and the audience was going nuts.

  Under the laughter, Jack muttered to Bea: “I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here and get something to eat.”

  As the curtain went down, ending the act, I heard two things over the intercom: the explosion of applause, and Bea Arthur cursing out Jack Weston. “You fat fuck! You ever do that again, I’ll punch you right in the fucking mouth!”

  Bea loved Jack, and vice versa, but she wasn’t going to put up with any shit. Onstage, she demanded that her cast mates be 100 percent professional.

  All those good residuals from TV allowed Bea a lifestyle of tasteful luxury. She lived in Mandeville Canyon in L.A., where her private and gated compound consisted of two ranch-style houses. The main residence was very large, the guesthouse smaller but beautiful. Her great kids, Matt and Danny, lived with her, and Bea also had six huge German shepherds and Dobermans that had the run of the gated area near the estate’s entrance.

  When I visited Los Angeles one time to meet with studio heads, Bea put me up in her guesthouse. My son Rick and his wife, Arlene, lived in nearby Studio City and were coming over to visit. Sandy and my sister Anna were flying together and were expected from NYC that afternoon. A healthy segment of the Aiello clan converged on Mandeville Canyon that day.

  “Good,” Bea said about all the visitors. “We’ll have lunch.”

  My host wasn’t working and that meant she was drinking a little, even though it was before noon.

  “Do you think you have enough food?” I asked politely.

  “The fridge is loaded,” Bea said.

  So is she! I thought. I opened the refrigerator to find a couple hard-boiled eggs and some overcooked roast beef.

  “Let’s reheat it,” Bea said, not fully grasping the situation. There was not enough food to feed the Aiello hordes about to descend. I phoned my buddy Joe Peck, who lived in Los Angeles and was originally from New York City. A longtime friend, Joe was always trying to get people work, which he did on a regular basis.

  “We’re in trouble,” I told Joe. “Bring over seven pizzas to Bea Arthur’s house right away.”

  The Aiello clan arrived, maneuvered through the pack of dogs to enter the house, and sat down around the lunch table.

  Bea was feeling no pain. She shouted out, “Let’s eat!” But the cupboard was still bare.

  At that moment Joe Peck entered with the pies.

  Bea responded with surprise. “What are you doing here, you dago bastard?” She was in her cups, and it was a jocular question, not an insult.

  Joe timidly offered his explanation. “I brought the pizzas,” he said.

  Bea grabbed her priva
tes. “I got your pizza swinging right here,” she said.

  The table erupted in nervous laughter. Don’t misunderstand when I mention the language Bea sometimes used. She never employed words to hurt. She said outrageous things to make people laugh, and making people laugh is what Bea Arthur lived for.

  Two of Bea’s friends were also stopping over to eat lunch with us that day. The gate bell to the compound rang. The actress Zoe Caldwell had arrived with her producer husband, Robert Whitehead.

  After a moment, all of us sitting around the lunch table heard horrible yells coming from the gate area. Bea’s dogs barked insanely. There was a small picture window to the outside yard. I saw one of the top theater producers in New York, Robert Whitehead, running past that window, screaming, with a dog attached to his ass.

  Bea Arthur became the single person I trusted most in our shared profession of show business. When I was just starting out, she gave me advice that only a sister or mother would give, warm, truthful advice, not only about acting but about life in general. Sandy and the children loved her. She left us too soon.

  My professional relationship with Woody Allen, the man who unwittingly brought me and Bea together, continued to have its ups and downs.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sergio, Woody, and Madonna

  Robert De Niro suggested me for a part in a film he was starring in, director Sergio Leone’s gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America. I had a small, barely-there role as a police official, but it was worth it just to work with Sergio.

  While on set in Italy, and later on when I joined him to publicize the film in Cannes, I soon learned the director was treated like a national treasure. It was unbelievable—everywhere he went, he had a convoy of police cars and motorcycles leading him to his destination. Bystanders shouted out his name as he passed, sirens blasting. I called him “the Italian Santa Claus.”

  Sergio was crazy like a fox. He understood English well enough, but he allowed everyone to believe that he didn’t comprehend a word of it. So he knew everything that was going on around him. When I worked with him on Once Upon a Time in America, he asked me to suggest a name for my character.