I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  Dyan Cannon, the ex-wife of Cary Grant and a wonderful actress, played my wife. The two of us were expected to do love scenes in the movie, which must have felt like combat duty to her. But she never made me feel that way. She was accustomed to doing movie love scenes and tried to make me feel comfortable. I was an amateur at best and I’m sure Paul was aware of that. It was hard for me. Sandy was on the set during most of the shoot.

  What I was doing with Dyan Cannon was just moviemaking, but I was afraid it might not look that way to my wife. I thought I would hear about it when we got back home. It turned out that Sandy wasn’t at all upset about my scenes with Dyan.

  “After being with Cary Grant, what the hell would she want with you?” Sandy said.

  Dyan and I talked quite a bit about her ex-husband. I told her I had received my first acting award from Cary. I related the anecdote of my telling him I was nervous, and how Cary had responded with his gracious “So am I!”

  Just before beginning The Pickle’s love scene with Dyan, I whispered into her ear how nervous I was, expecting her to respond as her ex had.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not!” she said. I laughed, and the whole exchange helped loosen me up.

  My scene with Dyan was light duty compared to what I had to do next, which was make love in a limousine to a twenty-two-year-old Parisian beauty by the name of Clotilde Courau. She and I also had a bedroom scene at the Plaza Hotel. Hard as it is for anyone to believe, this was truly difficult. To say I was apprehensive before my scenes with Clotilde would be an understatement.

  “For the sake of the film, I will get through it,” I said, putting on a long-suffering face for Sandy. Of course, she wanted to punch me right in the mouth.

  Since The Pickle was made, we’ve lost some very special people who were involved in it, Paul himself first and foremost. I always adored Meg Mazursky, Paul’s daughter, who passed away. Chris Penn, who played my son in the film, died much too young. Off the set, Chris was truly like a son to me. Shelley Winters, who played my mother, is also gone. I remember telling Shelley that she was too young to be my mother in The Pickle.

  “Danny, I want this role,” she said. “Please, don’t say anything to Paul.” It’s probably the first time that an actress wanted to play older than she actually was.

  Whenever I have the opportunity to see The Pickle, I am always reminded that there are not many of my films that I enjoy as much. But it’s an enjoyment that’s tinged with sadness, since I also recall all the great people who are gone.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ready to Wear

  The French director Luc Besson is well-known, but back when I first met him, I hadn’t seen his action film La Femme Nikita, which was being remade in America as Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda. I connected up with Luc because he had an interesting project to propose, a movie that eventually came to be called Léon: The Professional. I had already taken a look at the script and realized that there was something missing.

  Whenever I read a screenplay, I always look for the ways in which my character contributes to pushing the dramatic action forward. Whatever role I play, the character has to be somehow involved in turns of the plot. That sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many parts are written where the character resembles an inert piece of furniture.

  “If you want me to do the film,” I told him, “my character would need to have a little larger presence than what’s there now.”

  Like I said, I wasn’t really familiar with Luc Besson’s work. Only later did I find out what an important director he was. Luc promised to rework the script and I agreed to do the movie. But our agreement coincided with probably one of the oddest things that ever happened in a filmmaker’s meeting.

  Luc and I were sitting in an outdoor café at Fifty-Ninth Street and Columbus Circle when a man I had never seen before approached me.

  “Hey, Danny,” he said, lacing his words with a dose of attitude. “I just saw one of your fucking movies and just about everyone in the theater walked out.” He had a What are you going to do about it? expression on his face.

  “Why don’t you take a walk?” I replied.

  But it didn’t stop there. He proceeded to needle me at the top of his lungs, as though he were just begging me to kick his ass. So I got up, walked toward him, and raised my arm as if to take a swing at him. I didn’t even come close to connecting, but he must have thought it was real, because he went down like a sack of shit, then got up and ran off. The whole incident was witnessed by everyone present at the café. Some people were laughing, while others looked alarmed.

  I returned to the table, wondering what the hell the incident had been all about. Maybe it wasn’t the best kind of thing that could happen at a meeting with a director who was about to offer me a film. Then again, the part I eventually played, Tony, was a heavy, so it could also have been the finest sort of audition I could have possibly given.

  “Danny, look!” Luc said. He pointed to a building across the street.

  In a window on the second floor, I saw a video camera poking out. We figured it had to be the trash talker’s accomplice. They had likely been trying to set me up for a lawsuit, knowing that I frequented this café and lying in wait for me. If I really had hit the guy, if I had given him all I had, he probably would have ended up owning my house.

  Unlike a lot of American directors who leave the actual shooting to their camera operators (union rules sometimes require this), Luc Besson loved to shoot film himself. He treated the camera as a great big toy, and he had a kidlike smile on his face whenever he was shooting. Behind the camera, he would goof on me every so often while I was in character.

  “Danny, give me a smile! Danny, get mad!” Of course, this totally threw off my concentration, and I would want to murder the guy, but Luc was too playful for me to get truly angry.

  Besson had discovered some great talent on Léon: The Professional. Natalie Portman was all of twelve when we worked together. The camera already loved her. She reminded me of another Natalie, one of my all-time favorites, Natalie Wood. Her mother and father came with her on set, and she resembled her mother to an uncanny degree. You could see the grown-up woman just by looking at her mom.

  “Stay just as nice as you are,” I told Natalie. “Because this business can make a wreck out of you.” From all the evidence, Natalie Portman is one young actor who has remained a genuinely sweet person throughout her years of stardom.

  Besson and my costar Jean Reno were great food friends, always dining together, indulging in long, multihour meals in the European style. In Paris, our restaurant of choice was the Italian classic Bice. In New York, we went to the Supreme Macaroni Co. at Ninth Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, where you walked through a grocery to get to a restaurant behind. A scene in Léon is set in this now-closed eatery, the kind of great place that always seems to vanish from the city, leaving behind only nostalgia for what is lost.

  I learned a good lesson about working with foreign film companies on Léon. Hollywood is infamous for withholding negotiated payments on so-called back-end percentages, monies paid to actors as a cut of the box office. With foreign film companies, it’s different. Léon played for twenty-four hours a day in one theater on the Champs-Élyseés in Paris. In a single month after its opening, I got a $25,000 check for my back-end fee. I’m still waiting for my back end on some Hollywood films that were released years ago.

  * * *

  In the mid-1990s, both Robert Altman and I were riding high. My Oscar nomination ensured that a lot of job offers were coming my way. Altman was just coming off directing The Player. The movie was a poison-pen letter to Hollywood that starred Tim Robbins. The Player sold a lot of tickets. Bob had his first success after a series of duds.

  When word got around that Altman was casting for a film about the French fashion industry, A-list actors started banging down his door. He conceived of the project as a Nashville-style ensemble piece. The cast would be bursting with big names. Everyone
wanted in. Altman titled the movie Prêt-à-Porter, which is how the French refer to ready-to-wear fashion lines, as opposed to custom-made clothes. In America, the title would be Ready to Wear.

  I was elated when Altman called me. He wanted me for the part of an American fashion buyer, he said. My character would be a fish out of water among all the snooty Parisians. Then Bob dropped a bomb.

  “He’s a cross-dresser,” Altman said. “I want to put you in a nice Chanel gown.”

  “No way,” I said immediately. Me, a cross-dresser? That was so far from my personality that Bob might as well have been asking me to play a Martian.

  I’d seen everything in the world on the streets of New York City. I wasn’t exactly a babe in the woods. At Toy Top, the after-hours club that I used to manage in the Village, drag queens came by all the time. But I just couldn’t picture myself running around wearing a frock and high heels.

  “Come on,” he said. “Get in touch with your inner woman.”

  “I don’t have an inner woman!” I told him. “I’m all man.”

  Altman didn’t give up. He kept calling, wheedling and begging and telling me how great I would be in the part.

  Bob Altman had a highly personal style of directing. He threw a lot of shit at the wall and if it stuck, it stuck. In Bob’s world, following a script word-for-word was for wimps. Scenes changed drastically during shooting all the time. It was off-the-cuff moviemaking on a multimillion-dollar budget. Get everyone in costume and in character, aim a camera at them, and see what develops.

  Did I want to sign on to a Robert Altman film? Did I want to squeeze my six-foot-three frame into a dress? I finally decided that I did. Working with Bob was just too great an opportunity to pass up. In spring 1995 I said good-bye to Sandy and reported to Paris for a ten-week shoot.

  I entered into a movie-set minefield. My character, Major Hamilton, was supposed to be a boorish American, a buyer for the Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago. He stood out among all the sophisticated fashion designers. Major Hamilton charged around like the bull in the china closet, always butting into people’s conversations, saying the wrong thing, behaving in an awkward manner. It didn’t take long for my fellow cast members to respond to me as if I really were the boorish Major Hamilton.

  The number of world-class names on the set was phenomenal: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Lauren Bacall, Kim Basinger, Linda Hunt, and Harry Belafonte.

  The cast separated along battle lines. The Americans were in the minority. Altman had stacked the deck with European actors. Brits like Tracey Ullman, Rupert Everett, and Stephen Rea hung out together. Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni were old friends who had costarred in more than a dozen movies over the years. They were pros who treated me with warmth and respect, but many times the only friendly face I saw was Teri Garr, who played the wife of my character.

  Julia Roberts and Tim Robbins were closeted away elsewhere. They were working differently and we never saw them. Most of the fashion models in the cast were acting in their first movie. They reminded me of skittish gazelles. They were beautiful and I guess they liked me well enough, but I remained on my best behavior.

  From the start, Altman had the harried look of a man who had bitten off more than he could chew. Barbara Shulgasser, the journalist who had cowritten the screenplay with Altman, often stayed by my side, I think because she saw me as an island of normalcy in a sea of divas. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was picking my brain for the Vanity Fair article that she would eventually write about the experience of doing the movie.

  The screenplay that she and Altman wrote was a mystery. We didn’t operate with a normal shooting script. We didn’t even have pages. I wasn’t rehearsing lines, because I didn’t know what my lines were or if they even existed. There wasn’t a script. There were “situations.”

  We shot the American contingent’s arrival at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. While Kim Basinger and Linda Hunt improvised their lines as they waited for their luggage, I interrupted them with inane questions.

  I despise rude people. The character I was playing represented everything I hate about a person. It wasn’t me. You would think that professional actors would be experienced enough to separate the actor from the role. But some of my fellow actors interpreted Major Hamilton as Danny Aiello. I guess circumstances made it easier for them to get confused, because I’m an Italian-American, I’m a big guy, and I’m physical. In their minds, that meant I had to be rude.

  A few weeks into the shoot, at the end of March, things came to a head. We were filming at a gorgeous château outside Paris. In the scene, my character and most of the other cast members are in the audience to watch a runway show.

  When I rehearse, I go off by myself. I don’t bother anyone. That morning while we all waited, remaining in character, I sat off to the side mumbling the improvised lines I planned to say. I tried them one way, then shifted the emphasis, changed the wording slightly, and tried them again.

  “Why don’t you shut up!” Lauren Bacall called over to me.

  I was stunned. I hadn’t been speaking that loudly. I felt hurt and humiliated in front of all my fellow actors. Suddenly I was back on the street in the Bronx, reacting without thinking.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I answered, quickly and with passion. “Who in the fuck do you think you are?”

  Well, she was Lauren Bacall, that’s who she was. Bogart’s babe. The queen diva on the set. The European actors on Prêt-à-Porter all buzzed around her as if they were bees and Bacall’s ass were honey. Meanwhile, she had come at me out of nowhere. She was lucky that I hadn’t ripped her fucking head off.

  Rupert Everett moved between Bacall and me as if he were heroically preventing an attack on her.

  A brief face-off on a film set, the most natural occurrence in the world. But there was a repercussion. I did a scene only a few hours later with Rupert Everett and the other cast members. Sophia Loren, playing Isabella, was supposed to make an entry and collapse upon seeing her long-lost husband, played by Marcello Mastroianni.

  Sophia fell to the floor in a classic movie faint. The rest of us gathered around her in character. We played the scene again and again, improvising our reactions.

  “How about if I offer to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?” I asked Altman. “Something like, ‘Stand back, I’m going to perform mouth-to-mouth!’ ”

  “That would only make her sicker,” Everett said. I knew his comment arose from our dustup earlier in the day.

  Bob ignored Rupert’s comment and agreed to my suggestion. When we did a take of the fainting scene, I was just about to say my improvised line when suddenly Rupert Everett said it before me. He took the mouth-to-mouth line right out of my mouth.

  I couldn’t believe it. After Altman called out, “Cut!” I confronted Everett.

  “Do that again and I’ll break your fucking head,” I said to him.

  “Don’t look at me with those Mafia eyes,” he said.

  “I’m not Italian, I’m Jewish,” I said. “And this Jewish guy is gonna kick your fucking ass.” In a sense, this was true. I was in character. Major Hamilton was Jewish. Therefore at the moment I was Jewish.

  Rupert Everett and I didn’t have a chance to come to blows, because Stephen Rea stepped between us. I was so steamed that I lashed out at Rea, too.

  “Why don’t you go bomb a supermarket with the fucking IRA?” I said. He let go of me immediately.

  “I’m gonna see you downstairs later,” I told Rupert Everett.

  I never got the chance to follow up. Rupert Everett split the scene. He totally disappeared from the set for a full two weeks.

  After all that, I felt terrible. I went back to the hotel room, packed my bags, and called Sandy.

  “I’m coming home,” I said. I told her about what had happened with Bacall.

  I didn’t care so much that I had almost punched Rupert Everett’s lights out o
r called Stephen Rea a terrorist. But I was miserable over what I had said to Bacall. I thought I knew her. I had met her son Sam Robards, who was also acting in Prêt-à-Porter.

  I always liked Sam. He was such a great kid. But if he had stepped forward and socked me for what I had said to his mother, I would have accepted the blow as a proper response to my behavior.

  I have a salty vocabulary, but if there is a woman present and I happen to use bad language, I seriously apologize. It was how I was raised. Now I had publicly told Betty Bacall to go fuck herself. I had gone right back to the street.

  On the phone from the States, Sandy tried to soothe me. She told me that it would be all right, that I shouldn’t leave the movie.

  I ran my mind over what I might have done to Bacall to warrant her calling me out the way she did. I had first met her many years before doing Prêt-à-Porter, when I was starring in a play called Light Up the Sky at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton. Phyllis Newman acted as my character’s wife in the show. Lauren Bacall was friendly with Phyllis, so I saw the two of them fairly often.

  Nothing could be more charming and genteel than East Hampton in the summertime. I was living out there during Light Up the Sky. Lauren had a house in the neighborhood, as did Phyllis. Phyllis Newman was a wonderful person, and Bacall had been friendly and open with me.

  I encountered her again in New York City after the pleasant times we spent in the Hamptons. She was in town doing a Broadway show, Woman of the Year.

  “How’s Harry Guardino?” I asked.

  In the newspaper gossip columns and in casual conversation among my friends, the actor Harry Guardino had been romantically linked with Bacall. I knew Harry from working with him on a road-company production of a play called Breaking Legs. Thinking we had Harry as a friend in common, I asked Bacall the question and got what I thought was a rude reply.

  “You mean the goombah?” she said.

  Not a very polite thing to say to an Italian-American, sort of a derogatory thing, in fact, but I let it pass as a joke.