I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  “That’s my son,” she said in a conversational tone. “He never curses like that at home.”

  The opening was a smash, with a standing ovation and curtain calls. After I took my bows, I staggered back to my dressing room, totally drained. I fell into the shower. The next thing I knew, my three sons had burst in on me, crying. They were still wearing their tuxedos and were getting all wet from the shower, but they didn’t give a damn.

  This was my family moment. I had managed to prove myself to my sons in a way that I never could to my own father. Rick, Danny, and Jaime immediately recognized that their old man was good at what he did. They just wanted to tell me how proud they were. In my mind’s eye, I can still see us in the shower, crying and hugging, like a snapshot that will never disappear.

  The play might have been well received by audiences, but the reviews were, at best, mediocre. “If we want to see a fight, we’ll go to Madison Square Garden,” or so said the critics. Everyone in the theater community expected us to close in a week.

  Bill Sargent fought back as hard as I did in the play. The New York Times panned us with a lethal review. Bill paid for an ad that ran on the opposite page, testifying to how great he thought the play was and how much the audiences loved it. He asked me to do back-to-back performances to keep the box office up. We’d do a show, close for an hour, then do another show. I was taking a total of a hundred and ninety-six punches in a day.

  Everyone attached to Knockout tried everything humanly possible to keep the play running, not for ourselves as much as for Bill. I remember an interview I had with the influential Broadway columnist Earl Wilson. He had seen the show and observed that my performance must have taken a lot out of me every night. Not thinking about what I was doing, I opened my shirt and peeled down my pants to prove that I was black and blue from my ankles to my rear end. The next day, Wilson wrote about it in his column. Anything for the play.

  A few nights, the crowds in the theater would be pretty light. I always tried to whip up the enthusiasm of the cast members, reminding them that even though the theater was only half-full, the people in the seats had come to see us give it our all.

  The play ended on an upbeat note. In character as the battered but triumphant Damie, I would raise my arms over my head and scream out as loud as I could, “Knockout!” It never failed. No matter how many empty seats there were, audiences always reacted by erupting into applause.

  From his closed-circuit event productions, Bill Sargent knew the wild-haired boxing promoter Don King. Willing to resort to desperate measures to keep Knockout from closing, Bill arranged to have Don bring in one of the fighters he managed, Larry Holmes, who then reigned as the heavyweight champion of the world. As a promotion for Knockout, Holmes and I would fight an exhibition match onstage in the theater.

  Larry and I got into the ring. While we were putting on the gloves, I approached him. “Throw the right hand at me as hard as you can,” I whispered to him.

  “Are you crazy?” he responded.

  The theater was jammed with people. I wanted to give them something more than a silly exhibition. After all, they had come to see me in character as Damie Ruffino. Well, a few of them had, anyway. Most of them were there to see Larry Holmes.

  The bell rang, we danced the dance for a few turns, and then Larry threw that right hand just as hard as I had asked him to. If that blow had hit me square, I would have been laid out for a week.

  I slipped the punch, taking it on my glove, and went down like I was shot. There wasn’t a person in the theater who didn’t think I was hit, including Don King, by now thinking that his favor was about to turn into a major lawsuit.

  But I suddenly jumped up from the canvas, raised both arms over my head, and yelled, “Knockout!” at the top of my lungs. The audience bought the whole gag and went wild. Anything for the play.

  * * *

  Stacey, the youngest of my four children, is probably the most truthful person I have ever met in my entire life. She would not tell a lie if someone offered her a million dollars to do it. I admired her for this personality trait, but her devotion to honesty resulted in an uncomfortable situation in the aftermath of an incident that almost derailed my career.

  Sandy and I had three children before Stacey, all boys. My wife desperately wanted to have a girl, and the fourth try was the charm. Stacey was born in November 1969. I was totally clueless when it came to raising a girl. I felt that it was hard enough raising three boys. How in the heck do you raise a little girl? Very carefully, I found out.

  I was still trying to understand how my wife was able to bring up a trio of rambunctious sons. Remember, Sandy’s life as a mother began when she was eighteen. All those years, she hardly had a life of her own. How she accomplished it all was beyond me.

  With Stacey it was different. This was our little girl, something Sandy had dreamed of having all her life. She pampered that child as if she were pampering herself, which in a sense she probably was. The two of them grew very close. Me and the boys were the odd men out in that equation.

  As a small child, Stacey was extremely sensitive. I raised my voice to her exactly once. She launched a hysterical crying jag that I decided I didn’t ever want to experience again. I never repeated that mistake. Stacey inherited the shyness I had as a child. She didn’t want her friends to know her father was an actor. Her habit of honesty continued as she grew older. If the phone rang in our house and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, I would ask Stacey to pick it up.

  “If it’s for me, just say I’m not here,” I would say.

  Uh-uh. Not Stacey. She would pick the phone up and say, “Hold on, please, he’s right here.”

  I might have been a bit overly protective of my daughter, as I was with all my children. With Stacey, I was like a father from the last century. If I saw her hanging out with friends, I would go over and question the boys among them, to find out their intentions. Believe me, it wasn’t pleasant for her. When she saw me coming, she wanted to run.

  Stacey was never lazy. From the age of eleven she was working. She was a newsie like her father and delivered newspapers on weekends. She did it all on her own. Only when the weather was bad would she accept my help. As we drove her route together, she had a teenager’s horror of being seen with her father. She sat in the car and made me deliver the newspapers.

  “Hey, Danny!” her customers would say. “Did you give up acting?”

  “Just helping out my kid,” I’d say, and jerk my thumb over my shoulder to our car. But Stacey could not be seen. She had slunk down in the seat. God forbid anyone would conclude she was hanging out with me.

  Today, Stacey is happily married to a loving husband, William. They have three children: Sydney, Gabrielle, and William Daniel.

  On one of my days off on Knockout, Sandy, Stacey, and I headed from New York into New Jersey to go house hunting. We were finally contemplating moving out of the city. I was driving a Cadillac. On our way home, the three of us were in the front seat, ten-year-old Stacey between me and my wife. When we reached the George Washington Bridge, traffic was bumper-to-bumper all the way to the toll, with four lanes of cars maneuvering at a crawl.

  We finally nosed up close to the tollbooth, where two lanes merged into one. In the car to my right, the driver began to harass us. He had three women passengers in the car with him. We were slightly ahead of them heading into the toll, but the driver refused to let us through. I got steamed.

  Sandy realized what was about to happen. “Danny, please don’t get out.”

  The occupants of the other car looked over at us, laughing and gesturing. Stacey started crying, thinking any minute I was going to get out of the car. She knew her father well.

  The other car passed through the toll and went on. I thought the incident was over. Traffic remained slow. We took the upper roadway of the bridge. Once we were on the span, we somehow wound up abreast of the same car once again.

  The driver rolled down his window and flipped a cigare
tte at Sandy. The butt hit the glass right next to her face. I couldn’t stand for it. I released my seat belt to jump out of the car.

  “Don’t get out, Daddy!” Stacey begged, grabbing my coat, trying not to let me go.

  She cooled me off just enough. “Okay, okay, don’t worry, honey, I won’t,” I said.

  Life with Father. At times the whole world is my Bronx. I get challenged and suddenly I’m right back in the neighborhood, going toe-to-toe with some asshole. This time, I held myself back. Barely.

  Then traffic opened up. Just before the other car pulled away, the driver pitched a container of coffee onto the hood of my car, after which he took off. At this point I lost complete control of myself. I was out of my mind. I chased after him. We were speeding across the George Washington Bridge, with me twenty feet behind him and Stacey and Sandy screaming.

  Suddenly the cigarette flipper slammed on his brakes. I hit mine. I ended up a few feet from his back bumper. I jumped out of my car and he got out of his. Facing off in the middle of the bridge, we began to fight.

  I knocked him down. With my left hand I grabbed his hair and lifted his head, punching him with straight right after straight right. A stranger jumped out of a nearby truck and grabbed me from behind.

  “Don’t hit him anymore!” the guy yelled. “You’re going to kill him!”

  I shrugged the stranger off and walked back to console my wife and daughter. The female passengers of the other car helped the beaten driver into the vehicle.

  “You rich bastards are all the same!” one screamed. The other called my wife a whore. They drove off, one of the women at the wheel, the guy bloody and unconscious in the backseat.

  Stacey, Sandy, and I remained in the Caddie in the middle of the bridge, not moving, horns honking all around us as we sat there parked, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

  “This is not going to end here,” I said. “Somebody is going to report this. When we get home, I’ll call the police. If they haul us into court, so be it.” I turned to Stacey. “When that happens,” I said, “you just tell them the truth.”

  “Daddy, I saw you pulling his hair and punching him on top of his head.”

  I shook my head at my daughter’s innocent honesty. I said to Sandy, “Stacey will not be a witness.”

  When we returned home, I called the Port Authority Police at their George Washington Bridge office. I was passed through a few layers of bureaucracy before a desk sergeant came on the phone.

  “We have a criminal complaint against you,” he said.

  “Who filed?” I asked.

  “Three women who witnessed the assault.”

  “I defended myself!”

  “That’s not what they’re saying,” the cop said.

  “Can I make a counter-complaint?”

  “Not on the phone,” he said. “You have to come down here in person. Is this Danny Aiello?”

  There was no way the police could have known my name. The Cadillac I drove was not registered to me. Producer Bill Sargent leased it for me during the production of Knockout. But the police sergeant told me my name had been spelled out on the criminal complaint. I went in to the Port Authority station and filed a counter-complaint.

  In court I was represented by my financial adviser, Jay Julien, who happened to be an attorney. I sat in the court listening to the women who were in the other car at the time of the fight. The complainant himself testified. He gave his age as twenty-eight. He was my same height, six foot three, and said he worked on the docks in New York.

  Sitting there in court, he looked pretty capable of kicking my ass. At the time, I was forty-six years old. The guy had been taken to the hospital and kept overnight with a concussion. That gave his complaint a little more weight.

  Jay Julien began questioning him. “You look to be in great shape,” he said. “Do you work out?”

  “Yes,” said the cig flipper.

  “What do you weigh?”

  “Around one eighty.”

  “You work on the docks, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “A lot of tough guys down there, aren’t there?”

  “I guess.”

  “You want this court to believe that Danny Aiello, a forty-six-year-old man, sitting in the car with his wife and ten-year-old daughter, jumped out unprovoked and kicked the shit out of you?”

  The judge intervened, cautioning Jay Julien on language.

  It came time to give our side of the story. Sandy was called as a witness and told the court what happened. Then it was my turn on the stand. I explained to the court exactly what I remembered happening.

  I emphasized what to me was the strangest aspect of the case. Somehow the complainant knew my name, even though I was driving a leased car. “Starring Danny Aiello” was up in lights on a Broadway marquee. My face was in TV advertisements for Knockout. I thought that at the time of the incident the driver knew exactly who I was, and had set me up, looking for the possibility of a lawsuit.

  “Danny, let me ask you a question,” the judge said. “I know you’re an actor. Are you a tough guy?”

  “I am presently playing a boxer on Broadway,” I said. “I am not a professional boxer. I’m not a tough guy.”

  “But you are in good shape?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I admitted. “I have to be, in order to do the show.”

  Under oath on the witness stand, I went through the entire incident blow by blow, the face-off at the tollbooth, the cigarette tossed at my wife, the cup of coffee thrown at my car, the meeting on the bridge, he got out and I got out.

  I finished my testimony with a final statement.

  “In the middle of the George Washington Bridge, Your Honor, and with these two hands, I beat the shit out of him.”

  “Again with that word!” the judge exclaimed. And with that he threw the case out of court.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fort Apache

  In the late seventies, I finally shot a scene in a movie that Woody Allen was directing, what was then an unnamed comedy. I had a small role playing opposite Harvey Fierstein. Afterward, Charles Joffe, Woody’s producer, told Harvey and me that it was one of the best scenes in the film.

  During this shoot, I watched Woody interact in scenes with his costar Tony Roberts. Afterward I joked with him: “Enough with the two Jewish guys! When I was growing up in the Bronx, I lived in a Jewish neighborhood. It was never two Jewish guys going around together. It was always the Jewish guy hanging out with the Italian guy.”

  In response to my transparent plea for a bigger role, Woody only smiled vaguely.

  I never learned the name of that movie until I was invited to the premiere. It was Annie Hall. The production office generously provided me with enough tickets to bring along my family. Everyone was excited. The buzz around the film was tremendous. But there was only one problem: the scene with me and Harvey had been cut from the movie.

  My disappointment over Annie Hall faded when I landed a role in 1981’s Fort Apache, the Bronx. This was a major studio release featuring superstar actor Paul Newman, which represented a real kick upstairs for me in terms of Hollywood and the movies.

  I had loved Newman for his great performances in classics like Hud and Cool Hand Luke. This guy had it all, with a great marriage to actress Joanne Woodward and charity work that raised millions of dollars.

  Sitting in my trailer on the first day on the Fort Apache set, a feeling of unreality came over me. Naturally, I called my mother.

  “Mama, I’m here making a movie with Hud!”

  “Who’s Hud?” she asked.

  She might not have known the names of all his characters, but she knew very well who Paul Newman was. She was duly impressed that her little Junior, the boy who had given her so much worry when he was young, had wound up in a movie with one of the greatest stars of all time.

  Something else was contributing to this strange sense of unreality. My life had looped around once more. Fort Apache, the
Bronx was set in my old neighborhood, a place I knew all too well, having grown up there. The film’s title referred to the same Forty-First Precinct house where cops had taught me a lesson for the high crime of stealing a candy bar, handcuffing me to a pee-stained radiator. Almost four decades later, I was coming back to the Four-One, not as a petty thief but as a movie actor.

  The police precinct house was still there, but my old stomping grounds surrounding it were gone. The Four-One had earned its nickname of “Fort Apache” because it resembled a lonely cavalry outpost in the Wild West. By 1980, two-thirds of the people who had lived in the precinct had fled. Waves of arson and neglect had totally flattened much of the South Bronx.

  I had returned to the old neighborhood once in a while before this, but as we settled into the shoot, the full impact of the urban decay hit me. We used the Four-One precinct house as our set, but everywhere in the area was the same desolation, with blocks and blocks of nothing but burned-out rubble. Here were the streets where I played stickball, where I worked hauling wet laundry and lighting stoves for observant Jewish households, where I first romanced Sandy.

  All gone. Nothing was left. The tenement buildings on Stebbins Avenue and Boston Road, where I had spent so much of my teenage years, had been transformed into vacant lots. Of the ten South Bronx addresses I could recall from my youth, not one was left.

  There were economic reasons for this devastation. At the time, conditions had gotten so bad that residents burned themselves out rather than live there, as they received new housing courtesy of the city when their homes went up in smoke.

  My life looped around in another way during the Fort Apache shoot. I had my son Danny III with me. By this time, he was in his early twenties and had matured into a handsome man. He had become keenly interested in my movie work and accompanied me to the Fort Apache set. It was strange to have him with me on my old home turf, in the old neighborhood that wasn’t there anymore. Here I was, practically drowning in memories of my childhood, and there was my boy, just emerging from a difficult childhood of his own.