My mother began taking me to the movies when I was a little boy of three or four. She worked at factory and other menial jobs during the day, and when she came home I was the only company she had. Afterward, I’d go through the characters in my head and bring them to life, one by one, in our apartment.
The movies were a place where my single mother could hide in the dark and not have to share her Sonny Boy with anyone else. That was her nickname for me. She had picked it up from the popular song by Al Jolson, which she often sang to me.
When I was born, in 1940, my father, Salvatore Pacino, was all of eighteen, and my mother, Rose Gerardi Pacino, was just a few years older. Suffice it to say that they were young parents, even for the time. I probably hadn’t even turned two when they split up.
My mother and I lived in a series of furnished rooms in Harlem and then moved into her parents’ apartment, in the South Bronx. We hardly got any financial support from my father. Eventually, we were allotted five dollars a month by a court, just enough to cover our expenses at my grandparents’ place.
The earliest memory I have of being with both my parents is of watching a movie with my mother in the balcony of the Dover Theatre when I was around four. It was some sort of melodrama for adults, and my mother was transfixed. My attention wandered, and I looked down from the balcony.
I saw a man walking around below, looking for something. He was wearing the dress uniform of an M.P.
—my father served as a military-police soldier during the Second World War. He must have seemed familiar, because I instinctively shouted out, “Dada!” My mother shushed me. I shouted for him again: “Dada!” She kept whispering, “Shh—quiet!” She didn’t want him to find her.
He did, though. When the film was over, I remember the three of us walking down a dark street, the Dover marquee receding behind us. Each parent held one of my hands.
Out of my right eye, I saw a holster on my father’s waist, a huge gun with a pearl-white handle sticking out of it. Years later, I played a cop in the film “Heat,” and my character carried a gun with a handle like that. Even as a child, I understood: That’s dangerous .
And then my father was gone, off to the war. He eventually came back, but not to us. My mother’s parents lived in a six‐story tenement on Bryant Avenue, in a three-room apartment on the top floor, where the rents were cheapest.
Sometimes we would have as many as six or seven people living there at once. I slept between my grandparents or in a daybed in the living room, where I never knew who might end up camped out next to me—a relative passing through town, maybe my mother’s brother, back from his own stint in the war. He had been in the Pacific and would take wooden matchsticks and put them in his ears to drown out the explosions he couldn’t stop hearing.
My mother’s father was born Vincenzo Giovanni Gerardi, and he came from an old Sicilian town whose name, I would later learn, was Corleone. When he was four years old, he came to America, possibly illegally, where he became James Gerardi. By then, he had already lost his mother; his father, who was a bit of a dictator, had remarried and moved with his children and new wife to Harlem.
My grandfather didn’t get along with his stepmother, so at nine he quit school and ran away to work on a coal truck. He didn’t come back until he was fifteen. He wandered around upper Manhattan and the Bronx—this was in the early nineteen-hundreds, when it was still largely farmland—doing apprentice jobs or working in the fields.
He was the first real father figure I had. When I was six, I came home from my first day of school and found him shaving in our bathroom. He was in front of the mirror, in a BVD shirt with his suspenders down at his sides.
I was standing in the open doorway. “Granddad, this kid in school did a very bad thing. So I went and told the teacher, and she punished that kid.
” Without missing a stroke, my grandfather said, “So you’re a rat, huh?” It was a casual observation, as if he were saying, “You like the piano? I didn’t know that.” His words hit me right in the solar plexus. I never ratted on anybody in my life again.
(Although right now, as I write this, I guess I’m ratting on myself.) His wife—my grandmother Kate—had blond hair and blue eyes, like Mae West, which was a rarity among Italians. We were the only Italians in our neighborhood, and she was known for her kitchen.
When I’d be going out the door, she would stop me with a wet cloth, which always seemed to be in one of her hands, to say, “Wipe the gravy off your face. People will think you’re Italian.” America had just spent four years fighting Italy, and though many Italian Americans had gone overseas to help, others were labelled enemy aliens and put in internment camps.
There was still a stigma against us. Our little stretch between Longfellow Avenue and Bryant Avenue, from 171st Street up to 174th Street, was a mixture of nationalities and ethnicities. In the summertime, when we went on the roof of our tenement to cool off because there was no air-conditioning, you’d hear all kinds of languages and dialects.
The farther north you went, the more prosperous the families were. We were not prosperous. We were getting by.
My grandfather was a plasterer who worked during the week. Plasterers were highly sought after at the time. He had developed an expertise and was appreciated for what he did.
He built the wall that separated our alleyway from the alleyway of the building next door for our landlord, who loved it so much that he kept our family’s rent at thirty-eight dollars and eighty cents a month for as long as we lived there. I was an only child, and until I was six I wasn’t allowed out of the tenement by myself—the neighborhood was somewhat unsafe. My only companions, aside from my grandparents, my mother, and a little dog named Trixie, were the characters I brought to life from the movies.
I had a little silent routine I did for my relatives from “The Lost Weekend”—starring Ray Milland as a self‐destructive alcoholic—in which I pretended to ransack an apartment, looking for booze. The grownups seemed to find it amusing. Even at five years old, I would think, What are they laughing at? This man is fighting for his life.
My mother was a beautiful woman, but she was emotionally fragile. She would occasionally visit a psychiatrist when Granddad had the money to pay for her sessions. I wasn’t aware that my mother was having problems until one day when I was six years old and getting ready to go out and play.
I was sitting in a chair in the kitchen while my mother laced up my shoes and put a sweater on me to keep me warm, and I noticed that she was crying. I wondered what the matter was, but I didn’t know how to ask. She was kissing me all over, and right before I left she gave me a great big hug.
It was unusual, but I was eager to get downstairs and meet up with the other kids, and I gave it no more thought. Link copied We had been outside for about an hour when we saw a commotion in the street. People were running toward my grandparents’ tenement.
Someone said to me, “I think it’s your mother.” I didn’t believe it, but I started running with them. There was an ambulance in front of the building, and there, coming out the front doors, carried on a stretcher, was my mother.
She had attempted suicide. This was not explained to me; I had to piece together what had happened. I knew that she had left a note and that she was sent to recover at Bellevue Hospital.
That period is kind of a blank to me, but I do remember sitting around the kitchen table, where the grownups were discussing what to do. Years later, I made the film “Dog Day Afternoon,” and one of its final images, showing the actor John Cazale’s character, already dead, being taken away on a stretcher, made me think of the moment I saw my mother brought out to that ambulance. But I don’t think she wanted to die then, not yet.
She came back to our household alive, and I went out into the streets. As a kid, I ran with a crew that included my three best friends: Cliffy, Bruce, and Petey. We were on the prowl, hungry for life.
To this day, one of my favorite memories is coming down the stairs and out onto the street in front of my tenement building on a bright Saturday morning in the spring. I couldn’t have been more than ten years old. I remember looking down the block, and there was Bruce, about fifty yards away.
He turned and smiled, and I smiled, too, because we knew the day was full of potential. Every few blocks were vacant lots where victory gardens had been planted at the height of the war. By then, they were wrecked and full of debris.
Once in a while, when you looked down at the sidewalk along the lots, you’d see a blade of grass growing up out of the concrete. That’s what my friend, the acting teacher Lee Strasberg, once called talent: a blade of grass growing up out of a block of concrete. One winter day, I was skating on the ice over the Bronx River.
We didn’t have ice skates, so I was wearing a pair of sneakers, doing pirouettes, showing off for my friend Jesus Diaz, who was standing at the shore. One moment I was laughing and he was cheering me on, then suddenly I broke through the surface and plunged into the freezing water below. Every time I tried to crawl out, the ice broke further and I kept falling back in.
I think I would have drowned if it wasn’t for Jesus Diaz. He found a stick twice his size, spread himself out as far as he could from the shore, and pulled me to safety. Another day, I was walking on top of a thin, iron fence, doing my tightrope dance.
It had been raining all morning, and, sure enough, I slipped and fell, and the iron bar hit me directly between my legs. I was in such pain that I could hardly walk. An older guy saw me groaning in the street, picked me up, and carried me to my aunt Marie’s apartment.
She was my mother’s younger sister, and she lived on the third floor in the same building as my grandparents. The Samaritan threw me on a bed and said, “Take care, man.” It was customary for doctors to go to people’s houses in those days.
While my family waited for Dr. Tanenbaum to come, I lay there on the bed, with my pants down around my ankles as the three women in my life—my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother—poked and prodded at my penis in a semi-panic. I thought, God, please take me now.
Our South Bronx neighborhood was full of characters. There was a guy in his late thirties or early forties who wore a suit and a collared shirt with a loose, tattered tie. He looked like he had gone to a Sunday service and got ashes spilled all over him.
He would quietly walk the streets by himself; when he spoke, the only thing he said was “You don’t kill time—time kills you.” That was it. Our instincts told us he was different than we were, but we just accepted him.
There was more privacy back then, a certain propriety and distance that people gave one another. When Cliffy, Bruce, Petey, and I got a little older, eleven or twelve, we spent hours lying flat on our stomachs as we fished through sewer gratings for lost coins. This was not an idle pursuit—fifty cents was a game changer.
On Saturday nights, we would see guys just a few years older than us who had started to date, taking girls out to the movies or on the subway, and we’d get up on the storefront roofs and pelt them with trash. Sometimes we’d split up a head of lettuce and toss it at them. A string bean thrown from twenty feet away could really sting.
In the summer, we opened up the hydrants, which made us heroes to all the young mothers who let their small children play in the water. We hitched ourselves to the backs of buses, jumped over turnstiles in the subway. If we wanted food, we’d steal it.
We never paid for anything. We played the old street games, like kick the can, stickball, and ring-a-levio, which involved splitting up into two teams. If you could stick one foot in the circle that was the other team’s jail and shout “Free all!,” your whole gang would get sprung.
Kids were known to jump off buildings just to get a foot in that circle. We were always either chasing someone or being chased. When we’d see cops, we’d yell out, “Hey, what’s a penny made out of?” And then we’d all answer, “Dirty copper!” The cops would yawn or laugh or take off after us, depending on their mood.
But we all knew the neighborhood cop on our beat; he kept an eye on us. I don’t know how much violence he stopped, but we grew to love him, and he got a kick out of us. I always thought the guy had a crush on my mother.
He’d ask me questions about her, and even at age eleven I sort of knew why. There were a few others in our little gang—Jesus Diaz, Bibby, Johnny Rivera, Smoky, Salty, and Kenny Lipper, who would go on to become the deputy mayor of New York City under Ed Koch. (I later did a film called “City Hall,” directed by Harold Becker, which was based on his experience.
) But Cliffy, Bruce, Petey, and me were the top bananas. They called me Sonny, and Pacchi, their nickname for “Pacino.” They also called me Pistachio, because I liked pistachio ice cream.
If we had to choose someone as our leader, it would be Cliffy or Petey. Petey was a tough Irish kid. Cliffy was a true original.
Even at thirteen, he was never without a copy of Dostoyevsky in his back pocket. He had talent. He had looks.
And he had four older brothers who beat the shit out of him every day. He was full of trickery. You never had to ask him, “What are we going to do today?” He always had a scheme.
Often, when I looked down from my apartment window, I would see my friends—a pack of wild, pubescent wolves with sly smiles—looking up at me from the alley, calling out, “Come on down, Sonny Boy! We got something for ya!” One morning, Cliffy showed up with a huge German shepherd. He yelled up, “Hey, Sonny, wanna look at my dog? He’s my new friend, and his name is Hans!” He had got it from somewhere. Cliffy wasn’t known for taking dogs.
Cars were more his thing. Once, he stole a garbage truck. He also used to burglarize houses—at a certain point, he could no longer go to New Jersey because he was wanted by the police there.
He would tease me because I never did any of the drugs that he was into. He’d say, “Sonny doesn’t need drugs—he’s high on himself!” There was one thing that divided me from the rest of the gang. My grandfather had instilled a love of sports in me: he was a lifelong baseball and boxing fan.
He grew up rooting for the New York Yankees before they were even the Yankees—as a poor kid, he would watch their games through holes in the fence at Hilltop Park. Later, the Yankees got their own stadium, known as the House That Ruth Built, after Babe Ruth. That stadium is in the background of a scene in “Serpico”—shot by Sidney Lumet with such beauty—in which my character, Serpico, meets with a crew of corrupt cops.
It was filmed the same day the actress Tuesday Weld and I broke up, and, if you notice the look on my face, you can tell I was pretty sad. My grandfather would sometimes take me to baseball games, and we’d sit way up in the grandstand—the cheap seats. I didn’t think of myself as being disadvantaged—the more expensive box seats were just another block in the neighborhood, another tribe.
The difference between Cliffy and me was that Cliffy would see those same box seats and want to go down there. If there was a line to get into a movie, he’d cut in front of someone and just go right in. It was like nobody existed but him.
I played baseball for the Police Athletic League team in my neighborhood. Sports were of no interest to Cliffy and the other guys, so it was almost like I lived two lives: my life with the gang, and my life with my PAL teammates. One day, as I was coming back from a game in a bad neighborhood, a group of four or five guys not much older than I was got the jump on me; they had knives and God knows what else, and they said, “Give us the glove.
” They knew I had no money, and I knew I was losing my glove, which my grandfather had bought for me. I went home in tears. If only I’d had Cliffy, Petey, and Bruce with me.
It wasn’t just comfortable for us to be together in our group—it was necessary. At the edge of the Bronx River, about four blocks from our homes, sat the Dutch houses, or the Dutchies. Built by Dutch settlers, they were ancient buildings, now dilapidated but not quite abandoned.
Herman Wouk wrote about them in his novel “City Boy,” describing the surrounding territory as an area of “odorous heaps.” When we felt really daring, we would venture out to those ruins, which were populated by wayward kids and runaways—Boonies, we called them, because they lived on Boone Avenue. Wild plants grew along the riverbanks, including bamboo that kids would cut down and carve into knives, bows, and arrows.
The Boonies lived in shacks, and the lore was that they had poison on the ends of their homemade weapons. One day, I was on Bryant Avenue and saw the rest of the gang limping back from the Dutchies, looking defeated. Cliffy was covered in blood.
He noticed the expression on my face and shouted, “It’s not me! It’s Petey’s blood!” Behind him was Petey, blood gushing from his wrist. They had been making their way down a hill when Cliffy suddenly screamed, “Look out, there’s a Boony there!” He shouted out a name that was notorious in the area at the time. Even now I can’t bring myself to say it.
Cliffy had only been kidding, but the other kids scrambled in every direction. Unfortunately, Petey stumbled and fell, landing hard on something sharp and jagged that sliced through his left wrist. The cut was so deep that it went all the way down to the nerves.
It was horrible, all because of a dumb prank. The doctors eventually stitched Petey up, but in a botched way, so he couldn’t move his hand correctly. Cliffy always blamed himself for what happened.
I’m taking a bath in my grandparents’ apartment when I hear a rumbling in the alleyway downstairs. From five stories below, the voices reach up to my bathroom window: “Sonny!” “Hey, Pacchi!” “Sonn‐ ayyyyyyyy! ” These are my friends calling to me. But something is preventing me from leaping out of the tub, throwing on my clothes, and joining them.
I don’t mean my conscience; I mean my mother. She is telling me I am not allowed. She says it’s late and tomorrow is a school day and any boys who come to shout in the alley at that time of night aren’t the sort of boys I should be spending my time with, and, anyway, the answer is no.
I hate her for this. These friends are everything in my life that means something to me. And then one day I’m fifty‐two, looking in the vanity mirror at my face, fat with shaving cream, wondering whom I should thank in an acceptance speech for an award I’m about to receive.
I think back to that moment in the bath, and I realize that I’m still here because of my mother. Of course, that’s who I have to thank. She’s the one who parried me away from a path that led to delinquency and violence, to the heroin that eventually killed Petey, Cliffy, and Bruce.
I lost all three that way. I was not exactly under strict surveillance, but my mother paid attention to where I was. I believe she saved my life.
I was lucky that I had people who were looking out for me, even if I didn’t always appreciate it at the time. One of those people was my junior-high teacher Blanche Rothstein, who selected me to read passages from the Bible at our student assemblies. I didn’t come from a particularly religious family.
My mother had sent me to catechism class, and I wore a little white suit for my first Holy Communion, and that was it. But when I read from the Book of Psalms in a big booming voice—“He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart”—I could feel how powerful the words were. Soon I was performing in school plays like “The Melting Pot,” a pageant celebrating the many nations whose people had contributed to the greatness of America.
I was there to represent Italy, along with a ten‐year‐old girl with dark hair and olive skin. Our class put on “The King and I,” and I was cast as Louis, the son of the heroine, Anna. I sang a song with the kid who played the young Prince of Siam, about being puzzled by how grownups behaved.
I didn’t take acting very seriously at that point—it was just a way to get out my energy, and especially to get out of classes. But I somehow became the guy that you simply had to have in these school productions. In eighth grade, we put on “Home Sweet Homicide,” and I was cast as a kid who helps his widowed mother solve a murder at the house next door.
Before I went onstage, someone told me that both my parents were in the audience. It threw me off. To this day, I don’t want to know who’s in the audience on opening night.
Still, I felt at home onstage. I liked that people were paying attention to me. Right after the show, my mother and my father, who was now an accountant living in East Harlem with a new wife and child, took me out to Howard Johnson’s, and we all toasted my success.
A feeling of warmth and belonging came over me. It was probably the first time in my entire life that I saw my parents talking to each other pleasantly, not arguing about anything. At one point, my father even touched my mother’s hand with his own—was he flirting with her? It all felt so easy and natural.
When I was fifteen, a troupe of actors, as if out of some bygone century, came to the Bronx’s old Elsmere Theatre, on Crotona Parkway, to put on a production of “The Seagull,” by Anton Chekhov. The ornate theatre seated more than fifteen hundred people, and an audience of about fifteen came to see the play. Two of those audience members were my friend Bruce and me.
I don’t know how much of the play I really understood, with all its unrequited romances and the tragic character of Konstantin, but I was riveted by the performances. I saw myself in the lives of those fictional characters. From then on, I started carrying Chekhov’s works around with me, amazed at the idea that I could have access to his writing whenever I wanted.
I had just got into the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, and so had Cliffy, who had also acted in middle school and was very good. In the mornings, we’d ride the train together from the Bronx and emerge at Forty‐second Street and Broadway. For the four blocks we walked up to P.
A., we were mesmerized by the tourists and gawkers. One day, as we turned a corner, I saw Paul Newman, the movie star, walk by with someone, and I thought to myself, Wow, he’s a real person, with real friends he talks to when there are no cameras around.
On one train ride, Cliffy’s thoughts were focussed on the teacher of our voice-and-speech class. She was an intelligent and sophisticated woman whose claim to fame was that she had dated Marlon Brando. Cliffy said to me, “I’m going to feel her breasts.
” From the way he said it, it was clear this was something he had been thinking about for a while. I said, “What?” He said, “Watch. You’ll see.
” The class began that morning as it normally did, with the teacher giving us our lesson in her deep, resonant voice. Before long, Cliffy got up. He said something to her, I don’t know what, and suddenly the two of them were tussling.
Then Cliffy reached his arms around her from the back, turned her around to face the class, and there he was, behind her, with both hands on her breasts. He looked at me and smiled. This was the act of someone with no propriety, no limitations, and no conscience.
Most of the students were silent. I broke into laughter, as did a classmate named John. It was just an involuntary reaction to the shock of what Cliffy had done.
I loved Cliffy, but I was genuinely horrified by this trespass. John and I got tossed out of the classroom for the day, which I spent in the principal’s office until my mother arrived and apologized on my behalf. Cliffy was thrown out of school, and then thrown out of his house.
After that, he disappeared from my life for a while. One afternoon, I went out for lunch at a coffee shop near school, and there, taking orders behind the counter, was one of the actors from the performance of “The Seagull” that I had seen in the Bronx. I was a little bit starstruck, and I said, “I saw you the other night! Oh, my God, you were so great!” I couldn’t believe I was talking to him.
He seemed pleased to have a doting fan. By day, he wore a waiter’s outfit, and by night he performed in a play. One was a job, and the other was his artistic calling.
He was an actor moving from role to role and theatre to theatre, like actors have done for hundreds of years. This was how I came to understand acting as a profession. You did whatever work paid you so you could keep acting, and, if you could find a way to actually get paid for acting someday, all the better.
Just before I turned sixteen, my mother started seeing someone new. She would say to me, “You know, we may live in Texas or Florida,” meaning her and her husband‐to‐be. I was relieved in a way, but I didn’t see how I belonged in this arrangement.
This man was around fifty; I thought, This guy probably doesn’t want me around, plus I wanted the apartment to myself. By now, my grandparents had moved farther uptown, to an apartment on 233rd Street, so it was just me and my mother living on Bryant Avenue. Then their engagement was abruptly cancelled.
The guy didn’t even have the decency to tell her in person. He sent her a telegram saying that he couldn’t go through with it. When she received it, she was sitting at our kitchen table, and I was leaning against the arch of our hallway.
Four feet away was the door, which I was always aiming for. When she told me the engagement was off, I actually said to her, “I knew that was too good to be true.” It was one of the most terrible things I ever said to her.
How could I have? It bothered me that she was hurt. But it also bothered me that she wasn’t leaving. My mother did not react well to the breakup.
She was diagnosed with what the doctors called anxiety neurosis. She needed electroshock treatment and barbiturates. These were costly things that we didn’t have the money for.
She encouraged me to quit school and go to work. I stayed in school until I was sixteen, when I was legally old enough to quit. I was O.
K. with it—I had never seen school as my place. At one point, P.
A. had picked me to represent the student body in a photo accompanying an article in the New York Herald Tribune . At the last minute, I was replaced with another student, who was a dancer.
She was tall and had red hair; I had my dark complexion and my Italian name. It crossed my mind that she represented a more mainstream version of beauty than I did; you didn’t see people like me in detergent commercials or on soap operas. But I didn’t think the school was being biased.
Performing Arts was just trying to draw in more students, and this was the status quo at the time. After I left, I went through various jobs, all short-lived. I spent a summer as a bicycle messenger.
At seventeen, I had a successful stretch working for the American Jewish Committee and their magazine, Commentary . I said to the woman who interviewed me for the job, “I love sitting around offices. I love the sound of typewriters.
I love switchboards.” I’m sure she saw right through my bullshit, but she hired me anyway. The people who worked there—people like Susan Sontag and Norman Podhoretz—were intellectual heavyweights, and, though they were very welcoming toward me, I never felt like I fit in.
But, at an office party with a drink in my hand, I’d be able to talk to almost anyone. At eighteen, I was nursing a fifteen‐cent beer at Martin’s Bar and Grill, on Twenty‐third Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. It was a place where I’d sometimes go and have ketchup sandwiches: two saltine crackers with ketchup in the middle.
The bar had a big picture window that looked across Sixth Avenue, where I could see the Herbert Berghof Studio, an acting school I was trying to get into. A friend had told me about the school, and a great teacher there named Charlie Laughton. I said, “The actor Charles Laughton?” He said, “No, no, different guy—his name is Charlie Laughton.
He teaches sensory work.” I thought, I’m lost already. I was pondering this when suddenly the bartender, who went by Cookie, got an angry look on his face.
He got out from behind the bar and banged on the door of the men’s room. The next thing you know, he had hold of two scruffy young women by the collars of their leather jackets, and he was throwing them out. Cookie returned to his post at the bar, where seven or eight working stiffs were lined up, and the two women stood in front of that big, wide window in broad daylight and began passionately kissing.
They were doing it so that everybody in the bar could see them. There was a rift I was witnessing right there between two separate worlds: the brazen young women outside who were the very essence of liberation, and the guys at the bar who were shell‐shocked by something they’d never seen in their lives. The sixties were coming.
I was introduced to Charlie Laughton at that same bar sometime later. The moment I set eyes on him, I thought, This guy is my kind of guy. He was about ten years older than me.
He loved the poetry of William Carlos Williams, who came from Paterson, New Jersey, like he did. I enrolled at the Herbert Berghof Studio. I had no money, so I cleaned the hallways and the rooms where they had dance classes, and they gave me a scholarship.
By then, my mother had moved up to 233rd Street to live with her parents, and I had our apartment to myself. The rent was still thirty-eight dollars and eighty cents a month. But I had lost the Commentary job and I was broke.
Charlie, who was married to an actress named Penny Allen, was broke, too, so he and I worked together as moving men. We moved office furniture and a lot of books. Our friend Matt Clark, who was in Charlie’s acting class, ran the moving operation.
How does an actor prepare? He carries a refrigerator up the stairs. In my free time, I became a voracious reader. Charlie turned me on to many novelists and poets I didn’t know.
He would suggest various writers to check out and places to go, like the Forty‐second Street library for warmth and the Automat for sustenance. At the Automat, I could make a single cup of coffee last all morning, sitting there for five hours while I read my little books by the great authors. I would be reading “A Moveable Feast” and thinking, I don’t want to finish the pages, I like it here too much.
If the hour was late and you heard someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me, training myself on the famous Shakespeare soliloquies. I would bellow out monologues as I rambled through the streets of Manhattan. I’d do it by the factories, at the edges of town, places where no one was around.
On those side streets, I didn’t need anyone’s permission to play Prospero, Falstaff, Shylock, or Macbeth. I grew to love Hamlet’s rogue-and-peasant-slave monologue so much that I started to use it at auditions. I would say to the director, “I know you have your pages that you want me to perform, but I have a little something that I’ve already prepared, if you don’t mind.
” Usually they would give me a look that told me they were already finished with me. Another young actor in Charlie’s class was a guy by the name of Martin Sheen. In one session, Marty did a monologue from “The Iceman Cometh,” and he blew the roof off.
He was the next James Dean, as far as I was concerned. I got to be friends with him, and one day he said, “You know what my real name is, don’t you? Estevez.” He was half Spanish, and he came from Ohio, where he had a tough upbringing.
He was one of ten kids in a working‐class family that was always struggling for money. He had tenacity and grit, and I could tell he was one of the best people I’d ever know. Marty moved in with me in the South Bronx so we could split the rent.
We worked together at the Living Theatre in Greenwich Village, where we cleaned toilets and laid down rugs for sets. The Living Theatre had been founded by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, two actors who started it in their living room in the nineteen-forties and eventually moved it to Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. They did the kind of shows that made you go home afterward and lock yourself in your room and cry for two days, staring at the ceiling.
They helped forge Off Broadway theatre, whose success paved the way for Off Off Broadway, which made possible some of the shows I was doing Off Off Off Off Broadway. When I appeared in “Hello Out There,” by William Saroyan, we would put on sixteen performances a week at Caffe Cino on Cornelia Street, and then we’d pass the hat to what little audience was there, hoping to come away with a few dollars for a meal. It was our Paris in the early nineteen-hundreds, our Berlin in the nineteen-twenties.
That was the spirit of the scene. Sometimes one of Marty’s brothers would stay over at the Bronx apartment, or this guy Sal Russo from acting class who was going with a woman named Sandra. Her best friend was a musician with long dark hair and piercing eyes named Joan Baez, who would occasionally drop in, sit cross‐legged in a corner, and play her guitar.
She hadn’t linked up with Bob Dylan yet, but we knew Joan was going places. I don’t believe she and I even exchanged hellos. I heard that Cliffy was back in the neighborhood again.
Both he and Bruce had enlisted in the Army. Bruce made it as far as his induction ceremony, when he got second thoughts and threatened to jump out a window, so they let him go. Cliffy, on the other hand, served for a few months, but of course he got in trouble and was thrown into the brig before being discharged.
I knew there was no risk that I’d be drafted myself, because I was supporting my mother. Anyway, could you imagine me, that boy I was, going around saying, “Hup‐two‐three‐four”? I can do it in a play. Cliffy had come out of the Army in even worse shape than he went in.
He was on the needle and doing and saying all kinds of crazy stuff. He said he had been in the same platoon as Elvis Presley, and it turned out he actually had. He said he went to Canada, got a Catholic girl pregnant, and converted from Judaism so that he could marry her.
Every time he stopped by my apartment, he would go into the bathroom to shoot up, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of other people he’d brought. Eventually I had to tell Cliffy he couldn’t come around anymore. It was no surprise to anyone when he overdosed and died.
It made me think of a story that he had told me. When he was in the brig, Cliffy said, he was watched by a guard, a Southerner who carried a .45 pistol.
The guard would hold his pistol up just so and start saying ominous things about “the Jews.” In his Southern drawl, he would tell Cliffy, who was still Jewish at the time, “You know, I could just blow your head off and tell people you tried to escape. Would that be something to do?” He kept repeating it, day after day, until Cliffy finally turned to the guy and said, “Hey, man, you know what? You better kill me.
Because if you don’t, when I get out of here, I’m gonna come back and kill you.” Cliffy may not have been the toughest guy I ever met, but he certainly was the most fearless. It was Bruce who told me that my mother had overdosed.
I came back to my apartment late one night to find a note on my door, saying that he had an urgent message for me. I went to his place; he lived with his parents in the building next door, and he took me into their kitchen and said, “Your mom’s in a lot of trouble. She’s really sick.
You better go, man.” I jumped in a cab to 233rd Street. Arriving at the building, I looked up and saw the lights on in my grandparents’ apartment.
I went up the stairs, walked in the door, and there were my grandmother and grandfather, their eyes wet with tears. I was too late. My mother had died like Tennessee Williams would, choking while taking her own pills.
Some people thought that she had committed suicide, as she had tried to almost fifteen years earlier. But she left no note this time, nothing. She was just gone.
That’s why I have always kept a question mark next to her death. I’ll never forget the image of my grandfather the next morning, sitting in a folding chair in the middle of the room, nothing around him, crouched over with his head in his hands, almost between his legs. He just kept banging a foot on the floor.
I’d never seen him that way. He didn’t speak, but I knew what he was saying. No .
I thought that maybe somehow I could have stopped it from happening. Therapy, financial security—these things could have helped my mother. I had known that one day I was going to be able to supply her with all that and more.
It sounds like an Odets play, but it’s true. But I don’t think I ever told her that. My mother once said to me that she had a dream about me: I was standing on some cliff, like in “Wuthering Heights,” with the wind blowing my hair, my face pale and undernourished.
That dream made her so sad. How do you go from hearing about that dream to saying, Don’t worry, I’m gonna make it? Then came a hard period of mourning. I wandered around, zombielike—I started missing my stops on the subway, bumping into things.
It seemed impossible to accept that I had lost my mother. I was working as an usher at the Rivoli Theatre, in Times Square. The theatre had a candy counter with a four‐way mirror.
I would stand in front of it and examine the angles of my face. I saw my profile. I saw myself in three-quarters view.
I saw myself head on, and I thought, How could I be an actor with a face like this? The house manager eventually let me go for looking at myself in the mirror too much. He fired me in flight. It was a beautiful thing, like a ballet.
He was all the way up in the balcony, and, as he descended the theatre’s colossal winding staircase, he rounded past me on the second floor, pointed at me, and bellowed, “Now you’re fired,” and then continued on to the lobby. He never broke stride. What a graceful way to get the axe.
I almost applauded him. I was also delivering copies of Show Business to the newsstands along Seventh Avenue. I had a little red wagon that I’d use to carry the papers, from Thirty-fourth up to Fifty-seventh Street.
In the back of the wagon, I kept a bottle of Chianti. I’d be tanked by 9:30 or 10 in the morning. I made twelve dollars for one day of work, and I’d hit the bar afterward.
I liked to roll my single dollar bills into a big ball and peel them off one by one, like a big shot. I was adrift and alone, caught up in my feelings about my mother and a general malaise. Everything about my life was fading out.
One night, I got on a pay phone in a bar and called my granddad, up in the Bronx, and started to cry. He just kept saying, “Come on. Come with us.
Live with me. Come live with us.” I was really bawling.
He was a warm man with a soft heart, though he came from a merciless world. When his family moved to East Harlem, where many Sicilians had settled, they lived among gangsters who had yet to become household names but were still notorious. Though he was poor, he told me that he had never wanted to go in that direction.
Now he just said, “Come here. Come with me.” I was stunned.
But I didn’t go. I had moved out of the Bronx by that time and found a low‐rent rooming house in Chelsea for eight bucks a week. Something was driving me.
I had to make it, because that was the only way I would survive this world. ♦ This is drawn from “ Sonny Boy: A Memoir .” New Yorker Favorites An Oscar-winning filmmaker takes on the Church of Scientology .
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