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

  A Hoboken guy came into the Improv every once in a while. He had narrow eyes and a big shock of black hair. Louis LaRusso II introduced himself to everybody as a writer and was very big on the language of the working class. That was his thing.

  Lou LaRusso hadn’t had anything produced, but that was okay. Everywhere you looked in those days, there were actors who had never been cast and producers who had never gotten a show on the boards. There were so many unproduced playwrights around Broadway that you could hardly throw a rock without hitting one.

  Together, Lou LaRusso and I were about to change our lives.

  Chapter Ten

  Steps Forward and Steps Back

  I had never seen a play before acting in one.

  Louis LaRusso II didn’t inspire a lot of confidence at first. He was one more of the numberless showbiz wannabes who passed through the Improv. No one called him by his full name; he was just Lou. He wasn’t considered a professional writer. He’d been struggling to be one for a long time. His struggles plus thirty cents would have gotten him on the subway back then. But Lou had one attribute that is essential for success.

  He didn’t quit.

  He wrote and wrote and wrote. Most of his stuff was rooted in his working-class upbringing in Hoboken, New Jersey.

  Every so often in the early seventies, Lou would approach me at the Improv. “So, Danny, I got a play I want you to be in,” he’d say.

  “Why are you asking me?” I said. “I’m not an actor.”

  “Yes, you are!” Lou said. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  He was persuasive. “Try it,” he kept urging me.

  Eventually, I came around. “What the hell, Lou,” I told him. “I’ll give it a shot.”

  Lou LaRusso II’s hometown of Hoboken sits right across the Hudson from downtown Manhattan. Looking across the river, you can almost touch the magic, but it’s just out of your reach. Hoboken is the kid with his nose pressed up against the shop window, an outsider looking in.

  Lou tapped into that outsider feeling within me. The play he gave me to read, which he called Lamppost Reunion, turned out to be a barroom drama. The plot centered around success and failure—stars who achieve fame and ordinary folks who don’t.

  The main character, Fred Santora, was a Hoboken singer who made it big and climbed to the heights of success. The model, of course, was Frank Sinatra. In Lou’s play, “Fred” comes back to Hoboken, massively popular. Earlier in the evening, he headlined a fabulous Madison Square Garden concert across the river in Manhattan. Now he wants to see his hometown friends and bask in nostalgia for old times’ sake. It doesn’t work out that way, as resentments crop up and old beefs surface.

  Lou put out a casting call for Lamppost Reunion, which meant he went around the Improv and begged people to be in his play. There were five characters: the famous singer, an alcoholic, a bookie, a bodyguard, and a bartender.

  There were five of us. One was a longtime actor with a lot of credits, two others were part-time actors, another was an actor-comedian. As a final cherry on top of the sundae, Lou chose a partly deaf director who had little directing experience.

  Then there was me, the fifth wheel. At that time, I wouldn’t have known acting if it bit me in the ass.

  What a lineup. We were a gang of misfits along the lines of the Dirty Dozen, but with fewer members, like the Filthy Five.

  The whole arrangement looked pretty shaky. But as I read Lou’s play for the first time, I began to get excited. He used language that I recognized. It wasn’t refined. Usually it’s called “earthy.” Lou had nailed the reality of the American dream: great for some, a nightmare for others.

  The course of true love never runs smooth, but if you ever really want to see rough, just get involved in mounting an off-off-Broadway play. Like a lot of situations in life, if I had known how crazy the production history of Lamppost Reunion would become, I probably would have had second thoughts going in.

  We planned what was called a showcase production. The idea was that financial backers would see the show and might recognize the commercial possibilities. We were each given a script and would have to rehearse for two weeks. Budd Friedman at the Improv supported my career moves and made it easy for me to get time off. The run was limited to twelve performances, if we weren’t thrown out on our asses before that.

  I remember feeling a bit dismayed when we gathered two weeks before we opened in what was to be our performance space. We set up in a converted building on West Fifty-Third Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. The place served as a church during the day and a bingo hall on most nights. It sat about forty people on benches and metal chairs. Leaking radiators constantly hissed, and every once in a while the heat pipes erupted in mysterious bangs and rumbles.

  Lou LaRusso paid a small amount of weekly rent. He dubbed our makeshift theater the Churchyard Playhouse, but I began to doubt that it was ever a church at all. There was no evidence of religious denomination anywhere. The gentleman who hung around the premises claimed to be a priest, but he didn’t wear a collar. The Churchyard Playhouse became our theatrical home.

  Chaos immediately descended during rehearsals. All of the people involved were strong-willed, and a few actively despised one another and didn’t make a secret of it. I was too much of a rookie to realize that this is how the theater usually is. The company fought all the time. Shouting, name-calling, and even shoving were commonplace.

  Observing all this from his post in the audience, Lou LaRusso never said a word. But he sure as hell looked as if the sand in his hourglass was running out. His play, his baby, was being tortured right before his eyes. Whenever Lou was nervous, he had a habit of constantly running his fingers through his hair as if he wanted to rip it all out.

  J. J. Barry already had a well-established career and was a consummate character actor. You might possibly know him as Mr. Compton in the TV series Three’s Company or Uncle Gonzo in Happy Days. In Lamppost Reunion, though, he played the lead of Fred Santora, the Frank Sinatra character.

  I remember the rehearsal when we went “off book” for the first time, meaning we could no longer refer to the script and had to have our lines down solid. I had been working on it day and night since we started. I had Sandy run them with me. I recited them walking down the street. I must have mumbled them in my sleep. I was terrified of embarrassing myself onstage.

  Miracle of miracles, on that initial run-through I somehow managed not to stumble too badly.

  “Okay, let’s block,” our director called out.

  I swear to you, my first thought was about a football lineman. That’s what I knew about blocking. I didn’t know it was the term for charting out the movement of actors around the stage.

  The cast member who gave everyone the most difficulties was Ray Serra, a little guy given to boosting his height by wearing lifts in his shoes. As he crossed the creaky wooden floor of the Churchyard stage, his clunky footwear sounded like thunder. The director, who had enough trouble hearing as it was, laid down an ultimatum.

  “Either come in wearing sneakers tomorrow or don’t come in at all,” he told Ray.

  Serra blew up, cursing the director and quitting the company. I ran after him as he stalked out of the theater.

  “You can’t quit, Ray!” I said. “I’ve got a good feeling about this play.” Ray looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Fuck him,” he snarled, about the director. “He’s a loser.”

  For a last-minute replacement, we simply went back to our casting pool at the Improv and recruited an actor-artist regular at the club.

  Unlikely as it was, the production slowly took shape. How it all came together, I’ll never know. In the fall of 1970, I made my debut on the New York stage in an off-off-Broadway showcase production of Lamppost Reunion. I was on a stage, acting in a play. And I loved every minute of it.

  The first week was slow. The rule in theater is that if the cast ever outnumbers the audience, the show doesn’t have to go on. But w
ord of mouth slowly began to build. We began to sell out every night, and the initial showcase got extended. I started to believe that the whole enterprise might actually work out.

  Could it be that we had a hit on our hands? Maybe the space really is a church, I thought. Maybe the priest really is ordained, collar or not.

  Lamppost Reunion somehow became a must-see. Now real movers and shakers from the theater world started to show up for the performances, agents, managers, actors, directors, and producers.

  The actor who played the drunk had connections with money, and Lou met with them. The money men informed him that they had heard his play was very good, but naturally, they would want to see it a few times before committing to back the production. Lou agreed. They came, they saw, we conquered. The money guys loved the play and decided to provide backing.

  My first real stage work represented only a small baby step into the world of show business. At first I didn’t believe that anything would come of it. And for a long, agonizing stretch of time, nothing did. The funding didn’t come through right away, and we were left hanging with a vague promise there would be money for a full-blown Broadway production sometime in the future.

  * * *

  When I consider how I broke into acting, I always think of three men, recalling each one of them with a sense of gratitude. Budd Friedman of the Improvisation is one. Lou LaRusso is another.

  The third is Carmine Caridi, an actor with a true gentleman’s soul. He saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself. Carmine and I gravitated to each other because we had things in common. We were both Italian-American, both born in New York City, both about the same height and age. We could have served as each other’s stand-ins.

  Among the ragtag Improv crowd, Carmine was respected because he was getting parts. He had an agent and went to casting calls. When I began working at the club, Carmine became a true friend. Back then, I didn’t put a name to what he was doing for me. I didn’t think of him as a mentor. I thought he was just a good guy, being generous to me as he was with everybody else.

  In the spring of 1971, Budd Friedman threw a party for Carmine at the Improv. We were celebrating the news that Carmine had just won the role of Sonny Corleone in the big-screen adaptation of The Godfather.

  This was huge news. None of us realized what a cinematic classic director Francis Ford Coppola would create with this movie, but there was definitely a buzz around town about it. Mario Puzo’s novel had been immensely popular, and actors are always hungry for work. For a while, The Godfather was all anyone talked about.

  And now my friend Carmine had knocked down a huge role. The character of Sonny was one of the most interesting in the book. Hotheaded, cocky, and mercurial, Sonny offered an actor great opportunities to display anger, brashness, and a young and sexy brand of confidence. Carmine was perfect for the part.

  All the congratulations died in our mouths the night of the party, as Carmine had just been informed he was out and James Caan was in. At the time, none of us grasped the magnitude of the sudden switch, though we all knew that an actor could wait a lifetime for that kind of role.

  The producers had officially given Carmine the part. The contracts were signed, i’s dotted, t’s crossed. The commitment was so firm that Carmine wound up getting paid for the part that he didn’t get. For me, the whole experience turned out to be a lesson in the cruelties of show business, the way producers could dangle a plum role in front of somebody’s face, only to whisk it away when it was within reach.

  The Improv party turned into a wake. Carmine never complained. He met the bad news with a philosophical shrug. “That’s the business,” he said. “That’s the business now and that will be the business forever. It’s the world of broken dreams.”

  Since that time, I’ve realized that they make more broken hearts than movies in Hollywood. I always remember the example of Carmine Caridi and the role that almost was. I can never say I wasn’t warned about the ups and downs of an acting career, but I went ahead with it anyway.

  Of course, James Caan became a huge star as Sonny Corleone. In part to try to make up for what the producer had done to poor Carmine, Francis Coppola offered him a role in The Godfather: Part II. It was a nice gesture. If I had been in Carmine’s place, I might have told Coppola to stick it up his ass. But not Carmine. He had too much class. He and I wound up being cast together in the film, playing the Rosato brothers.

  What do you do when you get flattened? You get up and move on. That spring, while The Godfather was gearing up to film in New York City, Carmine landed work on Broadway. The ragingly popular production of Man of La Mancha was continuing its run, and Carmine got the part of Head Muleteer. He doubled as the back end of Rocinante, Don Quixote’s horse.

  We all laughed bitterly about that. Carmine had gone from Sonny Corleone to a horse’s ass in a heartbeat.

  While Carmine was doing La Mancha, he was offered another job. A road company was going out with Jason Miller’s basketball play, That Championship Season. When Carmine couldn’t take the gig, he forced me to go to an audition. When I say “forced,” I mean that quite literally, as he walked me to the rehearsal hall.

  It’s no secret that every actor hates to audition, and I was apprehensive to the extreme. I have always held to the notion that if directors can’t tell what kind of man I am just by sitting down and talking with me, then maybe they’re in the wrong business.

  At Carmine’s urging, and with all my fears tripping me up and holding me back, I read for the part.

  And got it.

  Within a month, I found myself out on the road with one of my heroes, Broderick Crawford, who played the lead as the coach. He was one of my silver-screen father figures. I considered him a model of what a real man should be. But he was having trouble at that point in his life with making himself understood by the audience. His dental work got in the way. Halfway through the tour, the great character actor Harry Bellaver replaced Crawford.

  The next year I again went out on the road with Championship Season, this time with William Conrad in the lead role. Conrad’s career was taking off with the TV hit Cannon, and he was none too happy to be gigging on a touring stage play during his off-season. None of us in the company were aware of his dissatisfaction until the last stop of the tour, in Chicago.

  Conrad took us all out for dinner and presented each cast member with a gold watch. Mine was inscribed: “To Danny, a champion of all seasons, Love, Bill.” We were all stunned by Conrad’s generosity, thanking him profusely.

  “Now I want you all to go fuck yourselves,” Conrad said calmly. “This has been one of the worst experiences of my life.” He walked out. We were left speechless.

  During this period when I was cobbling together a stage career, Sandy and my children never really took my involvement in acting that seriously. They didn’t see me tour in Championship. Of course, Sandy, Mom, and my family came to see me for every single one of my New York openings. But I think that until I started to get press notices, until I was interviewed on talk shows and got my name mentioned in reviews, acting was a bit hypothetical for my near and dear ones.

  I had doubts myself. I felt like a juggler with one too many balls in the air, thinking that at any moment it could all come crashing down. I was getting gigs—the work with Lou LaRusso, the job offers for minor parts—but it was as though I didn’t really want to believe it was happening. My life at that time was a perpetual knock on wood.

  Touring in Championship paid off in a big way. At the end of my initial run, I received my first formal recognition for my acting. Great as that was, it was made all the sweeter because of who presented it to me.

  Every year the Faberge Straw Hat Awards honors promising newcomers in the worlds of film, theater, and dance. The ceremony was held at Jimmy’s restaurant in the Theater District. I walked up to receive my award and was greeted by one of the most recognizable people on the planet—Cary Grant. There he was, the impossibly handsome movie star whom I had seen
dozens of times on-screen.

  I stood next to him, a smile frozen on my face. “I’m scared,” I muttered.

  “So am I, kid,” Cary Grant said, a great gentleman from first to last.

  I began to feel as though I was actually putting together a career as an actor. This was all happening during that time we were waiting to know for sure if we were going to Broadway with Lamppost Reunion. But before Lou’s play made it there, I landed a part that showed me where my true destiny lay.

  The silver screen.

  Chapter Eleven

  How Baseball Saved My Life (Again)

  With Lamppost Reunion still in limbo seeking financing, I was feeling frustration about my stuttering start to acting onstage. My film career hadn’t exactly taken off like a rocket, either. Early in 1973, I was involved in an ill-fated production of a movie called The Godmother, written and produced by Lou LaRusso. Made with a budget of about fifty cents, the misbegotten comedy concerned that most unlikely of characters, a gay Mafia boss.

  The Godmother was a humble, homemade project all the way. There should have been a line in the credits: “Conceived, written, and cast during late-night sessions at the Improvisation Comedy Club.” Budd Friedman had a part. Carmine Caridi and I both played bodyguards of the lead mafioso.

  To this day I believe if The Godmother ever got released, it would have meant the end of my acting career before it even got started. Instead, it was never screened, never distributed, and never released on video.

  Oddly enough, my involvement in Lou’s movie did have one positive outcome. I can date my membership in the Screen Actors Guild from The Godmother. Getting my SAG card for work on an unreleased film sounds like a good-news, bad-news joke, but that’s how it was.

  So, my first venture into the movies crashed and burned. But I didn’t give up. Mixing with the actors, playwrights, and drama professionals of the Broadway Show League in Central Park, I heard about a lot of opportunities. There are always tons of auditions going on in New York City on any given day.