I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you two were an item.”

  “He likes to think so,” Bacall responded.

  I thought about the exchange while nursing my wounded feelings over the Prêt-à-Porter incident. Did Bacall carry some grudge against me from way back when, for bringing up her relationship with Harry Guardino? Of course the two of them were going out. Word of it was all over town. They were in Woman of the Year together.

  Later on, in her Vanity Fair article, Barbara Shulgasser quoted Bacall referring to me as “macho.” “I know those Italian guys,” Bacall said. “I’ve been through that war.” She was referring to her time with Harry Guardino. It must have represented a sore subject with her, an old injury now made fresh. The memory came back to me when I mulled over her high-handed behavior toward me on the set of Prêt-à-Porter.

  * * *

  The Concorde back to New York was fully booked. I couldn’t get a flight home. I remained marooned in the hotel. In the middle of my misery, Kim Basinger called me.

  “We all like what you did,” she said, speaking about Bacall. “She acts so high and mighty to everyone. She was trying to set you up, Danny.”

  Joe Amiel has been a close friend of mine for over forty years, a restaurateur who owned Symphony Café in New York City and the Old Mill Inn in Spring Lake Heights, New Jersey, and now operates Sallee Tee’s in Monmouth Beach. Joe heard from Sandy that I was thinking of leaving Paris and coming home. Soon after Kim’s call, the phone rang again in my Paris hotel room. I heard the welcome sound of Joe Amiel’s voice.

  “Don’t leave,” he said. “I’m on my way over to keep you company.”

  The calls from Kim and Joe helped clear my head. Soon enough, gifts started to pour in from other cast members. With champagne, flowers, and chocolates, everyone congratulated me for what I did. And here I thought I was hated.

  Marcello Mastroianni tut-tutted sympathetically. “Danny, you must be a paci-feest,” he said. “No telling people to please go fuck themselves. Be a paci-feest.”

  “Fuck that,” I said. “I’m no fucking pacifist.” Marcello just laughed.

  Having Joe Amiel by my side made remaining in Paris palatable. He might have been a lifesaver for me, but he sure had a hell of a time himself when he flew over to serve as my wingman. His lifetime dream had been to meet Marcello Mastroianni, and he wound up having dinner with the man.

  Joe laughed his ass off when he witnessed me try to walk around in high heels, stuffed into a bogus Chanel suit with a falsie-filled bra. I wore a wig that made me look like an unpretty Barbra Streisand. Truth be told, I was the ugliest woman I ever saw.

  Joe and I were good buddies having a good time hanging out together. At this point I got a call from Cher. She was in Paris and wanted to have dinner. Joe was supposed to take me out on the town that evening. I called him up.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” I said. “The good news is that Cher is in town and wants to come out with us. Is that okay with you?”

  “Are you kidding?” Joe said. “Of course!”

  “The bad news is that she’ll have six people with her,” I said. I wanted him to know, since he would be the one who was picking up the check.

  We all rendezvoused at a famous rib joint, David’s, pronounced, in the French style, “Daveed’s.” David greeted his fellow restaurateur Joe Amiel with particular enthusiasm, rubbing his shoulders, hugging him, and practically humping his thigh. The situation amused the whole group as we enjoyed the best ribs I have ever tasted.

  Cher’s crew were all songwriters who met up every year at a sort of writers’ retreat, to socialize and perform songs for one another that they had just composed. I was seated near an unassuming guy in the party who said he was a fan of mine.

  “Would I know you?” I asked him.

  “Well, I wrote some songs,” he said.

  I asked him if any of them had been recorded. His name was Jeff Silber, and he mentioned a little number called “The Wind Beneath My Wings.”

  I practically fell off my chair. “That is one of my all-time favorites!” I said. “I sing it all the time.” Whenever I did, I always had my two favorite ladies in mind, my mother and my wife.

  Cher offered to pick up the tab for dinner, but Joe insisted on paying for the whole group. Afterward, she invited us along to a party. Johnny Depp showed up. Cher danced like a madwoman. All told, my friend Joe had a great time. He should have, because the grand total for this night of fun and fame came to $2,000.

  “Joe,” I said as Amiel shelled out for it, “you’re being punished, you prick, for the way you laughed at me when I was wearing my Chanel.”

  There’s nothing like a night out in Paris, hanging with Cher and Johnny and Joe, to put other matters into perspective. Joe Amiel’s presence and the positive phone call from Kim Basinger kept me from leaving France and going back home. When I returned to the Prê-à-Porter set, tempers had cooled.

  I was surprised to be treated as something of a hero for telling off Bacall. Several models in the cast told me tales of her behavior in the screening room. A former model herself, Lauren would criticize the performances of models who had never acted before.

  I finally decided that the whole incident was for the best. It was good to have the tension out in the open. Now at least we knew that we hated each other’s guts. Since catty infighting was the nature of the French fashion world, it all made sense.

  A few years later I was sitting in Columbus Café with Sean Penn. We were catching up with each other over a bite. I hadn’t seen him since we were doing Hurlyburly together in L.A. He had starred in the movie version. I hadn’t been invited to reprise my stage role in the film as the frantic addict Phil.

  I didn’t think getting shut out from the movie of Hurlyburly was all that surprising. These things happen in Hollywood. I had won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for best lead performance in the stage play. But that kind of thing evidently didn’t carry much weight in the suites of studio execs.

  That afternoon at Columbus Café, I got the sense that Sean was uncomfortable talking about why I hadn’t been asked to be in the movie version.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I saw the film.”

  Nuff said. Just my little dig at how the movie version came out. It had bombed.

  Sean laughed knowingly. He searched for something that he could come back at me with.

  “Hey,” he said. “A friend of yours from L.A. told me to say hello.”

  “Who?”

  “Rupert Everett.”

  Now it was my turn to give a knowing laugh.

  “He did a book,” Sean said. “He wrote that you tried to kill him.”

  Not quite. If I had ever actually raised my hand to the guy, he probably would have fainted. Rupert used hurtful words to insult people and expected never to have to pay the price for those words.

  He came close to paying the price with me. He chose a two-week vanishing act instead. I never read his book. I doubt if he’ll read mine. But I’ve been told how he described what took place that day, including the part played by Her Majesty, Lauren Bacall. Everett didn’t actually state that I wanted to kill him, but rather that I looked as if I would head-butt him.

  Rupert has his version and I have mine. Let’s leave it at that.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dizzy Gillespie’s Horn

  In 1994 the actress Christine Lahti brought a project to me, a short film called Lieberman in Love. She would direct and play the female lead.

  “It’ll be great,” Christine told me in a phone call, trying to entice me to join the cast. “We’re going to take it around to all the festivals to try to qualify for the Academy Awards.”

  That sounded to me like a pipe dream, since it was a television production for Showtime, and the Oscars didn’t deal with TV. But I signed on because the script was cute and the shoot would be quick. The final product would be only thirty-nine minutes long.

  Christine plays S
haleen, a hooker on the prowl for customers. I play the title character, Joe Lieberman, who has just lost his wife and is at a resort, feeling lonely and looking for companionship. Shaleen’s kind of companionship costs money, but Lieberman is agreeable. The two of them embark on a relationship that goes much deeper than the usual prostitute-and-john quickie. They fall in love.

  One of the scenes in the short had Christine and me making love in bed, stark naked. It was shot to appear as if we were, anyway, but we were actually pretty well covered. While directing the scene, Lahti jokingly cautioned me.

  “Don’t get too excited,” she said. “You’re a married man.”

  “How can I get excited?” I said. “You remind me of my sister Rosebud!” All we did was laugh our asses off while shooting the entire love scene.

  The shoot for Lieberman was short and sweet. I moved on. I didn’t think too much about it afterward. Christine never called me to say her little movie had been nominated for an Academy Award in the live-action short category. So it was something of a shock when I sat at home watching the Oscars in 1996 and saw my face filling the TV screen. The award was announced and Lieberman won.

  Throughout the 1990s, I saw myself cast again and again in roles that required me to act in love scenes with some of the world’s most alluring actresses. I think Hollywood might have lost its collective mind in this respect. One or two love scenes featuring Danny Aiello, that I could understand. But they kept on happening. I had romantic scenes with Melanie Griffith, Anne Archer, Dyan Cannon, Angelina Jolie, Cathy Moriarty, Sherilyn Fenn, and Cher, to name a few.

  As I indicated about my scenes with Clotilde Courau, one of the lovely young actresses with whom I was paired in The Pickle, I have a very strong, very negative reaction to men my age making love to young women in movies. Strong and negative, as in “getting sick and leaving the theater.” I probably could find legions of people who feel exactly as I do.

  Soon after Lieberman, in 1995, Fernando Trueba directed me in Two Much, a movie that also starred Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith. This was the film where Antonio and Melanie fell in love.

  We were shooting a scene where Melanie’s character is supposed to get married to Antonio’s character. In response to the priest’s “speak now or forever hold your peace” question, Melanie’s character has second thoughts. She decides she does not want to go through with the marriage. Instead, she walks over to me, hits me with her bridal bouquet, sits on my lap, and begins to kiss me.

  Before the shoot began that day, Melanie told me she had a sore throat. We had to shoot and shoot, repeating the action more than a dozen times. “Forever hold your peace,” hit me with the flowers, plop onto my lap, kiss. Over and over.

  I told the director that I wanted to speak to him in my camper.

  “Fernando,” I said, “I just cannot kiss Melanie anymore!”

  He asked me what the difficulty was. “Well, she has a sore throat,” I said. “All I can think about is getting sick. Please, I can’t do it anymore.”

  In his wonderful Spanish accent, Fernando responded with a line that sent us both into gales of laughter. “Imagine how she feels,” he said.

  We finished the scene.

  But all this movie lovemaking caused problems at home with Stacey and Sandy. Not severe problems, more like joke problems. My wife and daughter refuse to go to a theater and watch any movie with a love scene involving myself. They don’t want to be there with their friends while Daddy (or Hubby) is in a hot embrace up on-screen. Instead, the two of them torture me by renting my videos and forcing me to watch them at home.

  They fast-forward the action, slow it down, fast-forward, slow it down. They make me watch it over and over again, scrutinizing each kiss numerous times. They both have to be satisfied that I never opened my mouth or seemed to be enjoying myself. The pair of them are like the moral guardians of the Aiello household.

  Probably the most challenging movie in this respect was Mojave Moon, with a lovely twenty-year-old named Angelina Jolie playing one of my romantic interests. This was long before Angie became one of the superstars of the silver screen. I knew her only as her father’s daughter, since actor Jon Voight and I had long been friends.

  The script demanded that Angie come on to me in an aggressive, over-the-top manner. The first thing she does upon encountering me is greet me with a long, deep kiss. Then we repair to a hotel room. While we were filming, I felt a huge amount of embarrassment. All I could think about was that this beautiful young actress was my friend’s daughter.

  Angelina didn’t care. She threw herself into the role. During film shoots there are always a lot of back-and-forth camera setups called reverses, where two characters exchange dialogue and the camera shoots back and forth, back and forth. At times the other actor in the scene isn’t even present while I am shooting my half of the reverse, and I am forced to say my lines to the empty air. It is a great courtesy if actors make it a point to be there for the other character’s reverses. When they are, I always think it makes the dialogue feel more realistic on the screen.

  Angie and I had a scene in a hotel room where my character, Al McCord, sits on a bed and happens to get a glimpse of her character, Elie, nude after a bath. There was no reason in the world for Angie to be present when director Kevin Dowling shot me reacting to what I was seeing. In the usual course of filmmaking, the person I was supposed to be looking at in the scene would be elsewhere, perhaps relaxing in her trailer.

  Angie sprang a surprise on me. She insisted to Kevin that I should respond to actually seeing her, and seeing her totally nude. She thought this would make it easier for the director to get a proper reaction shot.

  No one told me and I had no idea that Angie was even on set that day. I looked up, expecting to see an empty room, and instead saw a fully nude Angelina Jolie. She had been only too right about my reaction. I choked, practically swallowing my own tongue, and then broke into laughter. We had to redo the reaction shot several times, and Angie stuck around for each take.

  * * *

  In the mid-nineties, my agent Richard Astor received a phone call from a casting director, asking about my availability for a film with Al Pacino. I was excited, to say the least. Even though we were both Bronx boys from the same neighborhood, we had never worked with each other before.

  For a long time after that first query as to my availability, I heard nothing. There seemed to be total radio silence on the part of the production company behind the film, which was an insider take on New York City politics called City Hall. I did other projects, wondering what the hell was up with Al and his movie. I had to wait for it to come to me.

  Eventually it did. Almost half a year later, I was called in to meet the director, Harold Becker. He had worked with Pacino before on a police potboiler called Sea of Love. Becker explained why the process of casting City Hall had taken so long.

  “Well, Danny, to tell you the truth, Marlon Brando was our first choice to play the part,” he told me.

  The City Hall character of Frank Anselmo was written as an Italian-American Democratic district leader from Brooklyn who loved Broadway musicals. Becker confided that Brando had seen the role differently.

  “He wanted to do it as a Mexican-American who loved singing, playing a banjo and/or a bongo,” Becker told me, shaking his head in wonderment. “After lengthy discussions with Marlon, I decided that wasn’t the way I wanted to go.”

  We both had a good laugh over Marlon Brando’s late-career antics. Becker offered me the role and it didn’t take me long to say yes. I didn’t suggest anything about banjos or bongos. Becker called a production meeting for the following day.

  Al was at the meeting with the other principal cast members: John Cusack, Martin Landau, and Bridget Fonda. Also present were a whole host of A-list screenwriters, including Bo Goldman, Ken Lipper, Nicholas Pileggi, and Paul Schrader. Pacino and I had never formally met. We spoke about the happenstance of our never working together, about our experiences in Pop
Bennett’s poolroom, name-checking Bronx locales such as Vyse Avenue, Southern Boulevard, and the Dover movie house on Boston Road.

  We were of slightly different generations (he was seven years younger), but he and I knew some of the same people, and we made that the basis of our shared Bronx experience. Working together on this film with Al was as easy as sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon having an early dinner with my family.

  While shooting a pivotal scene with me, the late Anthony Franciosa, playing a Mafia boss, kept forgetting his lines. This sometimes happens to all actors. The more Anthony forgot, the more embarrassed he became. There were dozens of extras on the set watching all this happen. The number of onlookers seemed to make it much more difficult for Anthony. He was a friend and a fellow New York native, and I felt for him.

  Harold Becker took me aside and apologized. “I think I’m going to have to fire Anthony,” he said.

  “Don’t do that!” I said, pleading for him to give Franciosa another chance.

  Anthony finally turned in one of the best performances in the film. Later I came to believe that Becker never had any intention of firing him. He just wanted to make sure that I was all right and not getting frustrated doing the scene with Anthony. I would have waited if it had taken Tony twenty-four hours to get a take.

  John Herzfeld, with whom I worked after my great experience on City Hall, is probably among the most underrated directors in movies. We did several projects together, and John became my close friend.

  We first met when we both received daytime Emmy awards in 1981, he for a TV movie titled Stoned, me for the blended-family drama A Family of Strangers. For some reason we connected right away. We did a television movie together with Patricia Arquette called Daddy, and another one on the Robert Chambers case called The Preppie Murder.

  There’s a quality that sets John apart from other directors, some of whom might be more well-known than him. He would rather do nothing than do shit. Every movie he gets involved in is done on his terms or he simply won’t do it. This is an attitude that studios usually afford only the most famous directors.