I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  Columbus Café was a show-business beehive. There were always a lot of meetings going on, producers huddling with other producers, directors with actors, agents with anyone they could get to sit with them. I can’t imagine how many contracts were consummated there, many of them signed while under the influence of a drink or two.

  At least a couple of the Columbus waitresses were lucky enough to get important jobs in the business because of the connections they made at work. Sheila Jaffe became a top casting director for The Sopranos, among many other shows and movies. She partnered with Georgianne Walken, who happened to be Chris Walken’s wife. I guess it wasn’t the first time someone began on the side of a table and ended up on the top of the world.

  It wouldn’t surprise me if Paul Herman had something to do with Sheila and Georgianne’s success. He helped so many others. Presently Paul is one of the owners of the famous Italian restaurant Ago in West Hollywood. Whenever I am out there he has his kitchen whip me up a dish of my favorite gluten-free pasta, done Sorrentino style. Likewise, whenever Paul comes to New York, we still see each other whenever we can. The friends I made at Columbus Café are mine for life.

  Chapter Twenty

  Hudson Hawk

  At the end of the 1980s, a lot of job offers seemed to be coming my way. I had just completed two films, both shot in Italy, Pasquale Squitieri’s Russicum and Man on Fire with Scott Glenn. This last project allowed me to air out my acting chops in a searing scene where my character had to beg an executioner not to kill him.

  In Los Angeles around this time, I met with screenwriter George Gallo, who wrote the screenplay for the movie Midnight Run, starring Robert De Niro. He was looking to direct his first feature, 29th Street, an ultimate New York tale of hard luck, a close-knit family, and a winning lottery ticket. Frank Pesce and James Franciscus got a writing credit, while George Gallo did the screenplay of their story.

  The film hadn’t been cast yet when I met with George. He and I sat in a restaurant discussing the project. Today a small plaque marks the counter where we ate, with this inscription: “This is where George Gallo wrote 29th Street.”

  My film agent Jimmy Cota told me that studio backing for the film depended on my signing on. When I read the script, I immediately responded to the father-and-son relationship that was central to the story. David Permut, the producer of 29th Street, called Jimmy and a deal was struck. Anthony LaPaglia and I would play Frank Pesce, senior and junior. Frank Pesce himself, upon whose life the movie is based, would play Vito, my character’s other son. I personally chose Lainie Kazan to play my wife.

  We were already in preproduction on 29th Street when Jimmy Cota got a call from a producer named Joel Silver. Joel had done multiple blockbusters and was a major force to be reckoned with in Hollywood. Silver wanted to sign me to a film called Hudson Hawk, starring Bruce Willis, with a screenplay based on a story by Bruce himself. The only catch was that the movie was to begin shooting in two weeks.

  “Danny’s not available,” Jimmy Cota told Silver. “He’s already signed to 29th Street, and it’ll be shooting at the same time.”

  Joel Silver is not the kind of producer accustomed to hearing the word “no.” He’s also not exactly a calm and reasonable guy.

  “You stupid bastard,” Silver yelled at Jimmy. “Consider yourself fired!”

  Silver wasn’t about to be refused. I was told later that he dialed up Joe Roth, then head of 20th Century Fox, the studio that was backing 29th Street.

  “I’m in preproduction,” Joe Roth explained to Silver. “We’ve already spent four hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

  “I’ll pay you for your preproduction cost,” Silver said. “Just give me Danny.”

  So the two power players, Roth and Silver, made the deal. Roth put 29th Street on hold. George Gallo’s green light turned yellow. That’s typical for Hollywood, where there are always a lot of bumps and detours on the road to filming.

  When I first met him, Bruce Willis was an actor-bartender working at Central Café. As his star rose, we still spoke on occasion. We agreed that should an opportunity arise we would work together. Actors say this to each other all the time, but in this case the collaboration came to pass on Hudson Hawk.

  I knew Bruce’s brother David, who was one of his producers on Hudson Hawk. I also knew his brother Bobby, a beautiful kid who died early on. Bruce’s mother, Marlene, and my wife became quite close. The Willis and Aiello clans hung out, mostly when we were on location in Italy. We went swimming together and went out to eat. We resembled an extended family there for a while, which made it all the more difficult later when the shit hit the fan.

  Much of my work on Hudson Hawk was done in Italy, with small portions in New York City. The project was Bruce’s baby all the way. He had conceived the idea of a caper film that would resemble the Bob Hope– Bing Crosby road movies. He would be Bing and I would be Bob, or maybe it was the other way around.

  Even though the director of record was Michael Lehmann, just coming off the teen hit Heathers, Bruce was very much involved in every aspect of the filmmaking. He had a habit of giving line readings to all the actors involved, including me. A line reading is where a director or some other know-it-all actually recites your line for you, suggesting that you “do it this way.” For a professional actor, it can be the equivalent of a slap in the face. Giving line readings is widely considered bad form, which is not to say the practice never happens.

  My son Danny III stunt-doubled for me on Hudson Hawk, and just like there were good and bad things about working with Bruce as a friend and costar, there were two sides to having Danny on the set. I loved seeing him, of course, but his job always made me nervous. From his first work on Fort Apache, the Bronx, Danny had progressed to where he was tops in his field. My pride over that fact battled it out with my anxiety as a father.

  I could have listed thousands of jobs that I would have liked my son to choose, and not one of them would have been movie stuntman. The whole idea of my son in a risky situation made me queasy. Of all the times we worked together, there were only a few instances when I witnessed him doing dangerous stunts. A memorable one was on Hudson Hawk.

  He was shooting a scene on Fifty-Seventh Street in NYC. Danny and his stunt partner were doubling me and Bruce Willis. I stood below peering up at two tall buildings. Twelve floors up was a cable about thirty-five feet long, stretching from one building to the other. I watched the two figures swing out onto the cable, knowing that one of them was my son and not enjoying the fact that I knew he was up there.

  Suddenly the cable dropped downward several feet with the two stuntmen attached. I almost had a heart attack right there on the spot. I didn’t know that the drop had been thoroughly planned out. You would think someone might have warned me, just to safeguard my cardiac health.

  Danny and the other stuntman made it across the cable safely, a hundred feet above the street. To them, it was no big deal, just another day on the job. I swore to myself that the crazy Hudson Hawk cable climb would be the last stunt I’d ever watch my son do.

  As the shoot progressed, Bruce took over more and more aspects of the filmmaking. He began actually directing scenes. This created a lot of problems for Michael Lehmann, the director of record. I asked Michael why he didn’t just quit the shoot.

  “Not for the money I’m getting paid,” he said.

  Joel Silver was on set a lot, huddling with Willis. There wasn’t anyone around with the juice to say no to either of them. “Fuck art!” was one of Joel’s favorite phrases, which he employed whenever somebody suggested a more nuanced approach to filmmaking.

  I had just finished a scene where my character is locked in a limousine, which goes over a cliff, crashes into a ravine, and catches fire. Somehow, I survive the accident—this is a comedy, after all. When I staggered out of the limo, Bruce wanted to have my hair electrified and standing up on end, Don King style, with smoke coming out of it.

  “That’s comedy time in the Rockies,” I
said. “I’m not doing it.”

  I alluded to the fact that Christopher Lloyd had a similar beat in Back to the Future. I thought Hollywood comedies had been there and done that.

  “I’ll tell you what’s funny,” I said to Bruce. “What’s funny is if my hair is well-groomed and perfectly in place, and it has smoke coming out of it. That’s what’s funny.”

  He got upset. “We’re paying you one million dollars to do this movie,” he said.

  “Not quite true,” I said.

  Bruce turned his back and walked away. That was that. We finished the film and our friendship at the same time.

  * * *

  I was doing films back-to-back now, packing up on the Hudson Hawk set and going directly into 29th Street. I could not wait to begin shooting what I’ve always thought to be the ultimate father-and-son film.

  I enjoyed working with 29th Street producer David Permut and I loved the cast. My son Rick had a part and my son Danny was the stunt coordinator on the movie. Even Sandy had a small speaking role, but the scene she was in was left on the cutting room floor.

  Initially, Anthony LaPaglia’s Australian accent concerned me, since he would be playing a character from Queens. But it was not a problem and he turned out to be terrific.

  Generally, I liked the way the shoot was going and I told George Gallo as much. But I also mentioned that there were certain over-the-top comedic beats in the script that were bothering me. To me, the baggy-pants humor detracted from the father-and-son story that was the core of the film.

  “Don’t worry, Danny, I’ll take care of them,” George said.

  I worked hard fleshing out my character in this film. In one scene, LaPaglia confronts me, his father. “What did you ever do for us?” he demands.

  “I stayed, that’s what I did! I stayed for thirty-five years and I did whatever the hell I had to do to keep a roof over our heads. That’s what the fuck I did.”

  “Big deal!” LaPaglia responds. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

  I get right back into the son’s face. “You know, we were doing pretty good until you came along. I didn’t want you, but your mother did, and your mother almost died giving birth to you. You get this straight, you sorry son of a bitch. I am not a loser! I am not a fucking loser!”

  I thought it was probably among the best scenes that I had ever helped write. It came directly from my heart.

  The film was screened in Toronto. Sandy and I drove up to see it. Watching the finished cut, I realized that George had not kept his promise to smooth out the broad comedic beats that didn’t fit in this wonderful movie. The film turned out to be very good, but I always thought it could have been great.

  Producer Robert Evans, famous for making The Godfather and so many other films, called me at home in New Jersey one evening. He told me that he and Jack Nicholson had screened 29th Street in his home and they both loved it.

  “If the curse words weren’t used, it would have been better than It’s a Wonderful Life,” Evans said.

  From 29th Street I went almost to the opposite end of the filmmaking spectrum, playing the lead in a sprawling historical biopic. In 1991 I met with director John Mackenzie and writer Stephen Davis for a film project on the life of Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald.

  We all had dinner together at Columbus Café. John was yet one more of those foreign directors with an intuitive feel for my work. He had directed a BAFTA-nominated cult thriller called The Long Good Friday. John, Steve, and I talked late into the night, discussing the concept of the Jack Ruby project. They never took the position that the film would be a true description of the Kennedy assassination.

  “Whenever there are known facts,” John said, “those facts will be used, and when there are not, then we’ll employ theatrical license.”

  JFK was being shot at the same time, and Oliver Stone was all over the talk shows claiming that his film would reveal what actually happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. In contrast, Ruby would come out with a disclaimer about its being a work of drama. I much preferred the John Mackenzie approach to Stone’s.

  A few months after our first meeting, we were in Los Angeles to begin shooting the film. Ruby turned out to be a great shoot. I was very excited about working with Mackenzie, one of the UK’s best film directors.

  I did my own research on Jack Ruby by talking to people who knew him and had appeared in his clubs, comics such as Milton Berle and Jerry Vale. They gave me telling details of Jack’s personality. He would give comics silk shirts that he kept in the trunk of his car, usually for the purpose of selling them, but free for the celebrities who worked his clubs. Ruby packed a gun everywhere he went, because he didn’t believe in banks and carried a lot of money around with him.

  One note that came up in my research was the fact that Jack Ruby sat shiva with his sister in her home when John Kennedy was assassinated. Ruby loved President Kennedy, whom he considered the savior of the Jewish people. I set out to learn the prayer for the dead in Hebrew, working very hard at it. We shot the scene, but unfortunately it didn’t make the final cut. I was disappointed because I wanted the audience to know how truly grief-stricken Jack Ruby was about President Kennedy’s being killed.

  Sherilyn Fenn, an excellent actress who at that time I considered to be one of the most beautiful women in movies, played opposite me as Sheryl Ann DuJean, a.k.a. Candy Cane, a dancer in one of Jack Ruby’s clubs. She had an elaborate striptease scene. The day it was shot, I consciously chose to absent myself from the set.

  “You didn’t watch the scene?” Sherilyn asked me afterward.

  “I’m sure you were great,” I said, smiling. The truth is, I felt too embarrassed to do so. My old-fashioned attitudes often come out when I’m confronted with overt sexuality on the set. The relationship between Ruby and his dancer girlfriend stirred up all my negative feelings surrounding movie romances between older men and younger women.

  We wrapped the film just as JFK was about to hit the theaters. There was some debate within our production team as to when Ruby should open. I felt strongly that the film should debut while JFK was still in release. I met with the producers of Ruby from Propaganda Films, Michael Kuhn, Steve Golin, Stephen Davis, and Sigurjon Sighvatsson.

  “Use the publicity surrounding JFK to benefit our film,” I argued. But the publicity campaign for Ruby had been locked in for spring 1992. We opened at the end of March. It was too late, and we did very little business.

  * * *

  I have occasionally been asked to speak to performing arts classes or groups of young actors. Since I never had any professional training, I can only give them the lessons I’ve learned from experience. One bit of wisdom I usually include comes from simple observation, working on film sets and in the theater over the years.

  “If you go into the business of acting while doing drugs, you’ll never get off them, because you’ll need that crutch forever. There can be no greater feeling than performing without the help of anything but your God-given talent.”

  On the whole, my opinion of performing arts education has been mixed. I remember once being asked by Ed Setrakian to perform a scene at the Actors Studio. Ed was directing me at the time in an off-Broadway play titled Easy Money, written by John Kostmayer. As well as being a director, Ed was also a well-respected actor and a member of the Actors Studio.

  “Lee Strasberg wants you as a member of the studio,” Ed told me. “You can do any scene that you choose.”

  The Actors Studio is probably the most prestigious venue anywhere in the world for teaching the dramatic arts. It has a celebrated history, with members like Marlon Brando, Sally Field, Al Pacino, Bea Arthur, and Harvey Keitel, to name only a few. Just to walk by the place in Hell’s Kitchen (on West Forty-Fourth, down the street from the Improv) means you’re entering who’s-who territory. Lee Strasberg served as its director. Membership at the studio is considered an honor in the acting community.

  I paid a visit to au
dit an acting class. I was blown away while watching the actors preparing to do a scene. They were extremely intense. I got the idea that they were going to war. It didn’t seem like any of them were having much fun.

  Even though I probably could not have fully articulated my philosophy of performing, I knew that what I was seeing at the studio was foreign to me. Acting is hard enough already. I wasn’t looking to make it any harder. I decided to take a pass on appearing in Ed’s scene at the studio.

  I think about this experience whenever I recall working with director Paul Mazursky, who always managed to find the joy and fun in the craft of acting. Throughout my career I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the world’s greatest film directors, foreign and homegrown. Paul Mazursky was my favorite.

  Coincidentally, Mazursky was also responsible for my biggest movie payday. His film The Pickle was loosely based on Paul’s life as a maverick director, producer, and actor in the wilds of Hollywood. Paul wanted me to play the character of Harry Stone, who was essentially his alter ego. In the film, Stone is a once-famous director on his way out.

  Contract negotiations went on for a couple of months. I remember my agent Jimmy Cota telling me how Sam Cohn, Paul Mazursky’s agent, responded.

  “What the hell is a Danny Aiello?” Cohn demanded. “Doesn’t he realize he’s working with a great director?”

  “That’s why he thinks he should get paid the greatest money, because he’s working with the greatest,” Cota responded.

  My agent got what we asked for because of one reason and one reason only: Paul wanted me in the film. His daughter, Meg Mazursky, saw me in The House of Blue Leaves at Lincoln Center and convinced her father that I was the one who should play Harry Stone.

  Paul surrounded me with a wonderful cast of people: Jerry Stiller, Dyan Cannon, Barry Miller, Chris Penn, Ally Sheedy, Griffin Dunne, Shelley Winters, Little Richard, and so many more. The director himself acted in his film, playing the projectionist-friend of my character.