I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  My takeaway from the whole frustrating experience was that Michael Bloomberg never intended to move on something that was suggested by the previous administration. I can’t understand this kind of attitude on the part of politicians. It didn’t matter who first proposed it. It was good for New York City under Rudolph Giuliani, and it was good for it under Bloomberg.

  Reluctantly, our group sued the city, with our attorney Dan Marotta representing us in New York Supreme Court. We lost the initial round, a development that was well covered in the media. But no journalist bothered to write about our appeal, which we won and which awarded our group a seven-figure settlement. Of course, this was nowhere near the amount of money that was spent in the three years we had been trying to turn Stapleton into a Hollywood-level studio.

  The judge who ruled for us on the appeal, Emily Jane Goodman, issued a blistering statement on the case. “I don’t know how the city can expect to do business with private parties if this is the way it acts,” she said.

  As the Stapleton mess was winding down, I lost a longtime friend whose passing had me reassessing my whole career. Louis LaRusso II died on February 22, 2003. At that point, we had known each other for more than three decades. Together, we had worked on a film and four plays, Lamppost Reunion, Wheelbarrow Closers, Knockout, and, in 1999, a limited-run production of his drama The December Song.

  It is difficult for me to fully grasp the impact Lou had on my life. If not for him, I don’t know where I would have ended up—surely not on the Broadway stage. He and I hung out together often and never had a disagreement worth mentioning. How many of our friends can we say that about?

  A few months after Lou’s death, I was acting in a play called Adult Entertainment at the Variety Arts Theater on Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street in New York. I got a visit in my dressing room after the show one night from a young film director. Kevin Jordan had studied at NYU and was now aiming to make his second feature. His first, Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire, won a new director award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

  Kevin asked if I would be interested in reading a script that he intended to shoot over the course of the next few months.

  “It’s called Brooklyn Lobster,” he said.

  “I hate seafood,” I responded jokingly.

  It turned out the Jordan family owned a lobster farm and restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, which was in the process of being taken away by the IRS. Naturally, on an independent movie such as this one, there was hardly any money involved. But his project was at least partially financed by Kevin’s father, Bill, and he seemed like a nice enough kid. In his enthusiasm for his work, he brought to mind Lou LaRusso in a lot of ways.

  I read the Brooklyn Lobster script and called Kevin at two o’clock in the morning. I can be very impulsive sometimes. When I want to do something, I have to do it immediately.

  Kevin answered the phone. At first he refused to believe it was me.

  “Yeah, Darren, sure, you’re Danny Aiello,” he said, thinking it was his brother Darren calling. Finally I persuaded him that I was Danny Aiello and I had decided to do his film.

  I played Jane Curtin’s husband in the movie, and the two of us had a great time with the project. During the shoot I fell in love with lobsters. Not to eat—never!—but just to play around with. I even kissed one on-screen. The lobster seemed to like it. I guess it was trying to tell me it held no hard feelings that I refused to eat it.

  Brooklyn Lobster was released in 2005 to great reviews, many of which highlighted my performance in particular. Variety wrote that the film “comes across primarily as a showcase for Danny Aiello in a powerhouse performance as a Sheepshead Bay lobster wholesaler.”

  The kid who had first visited me in my Adult Entertainment dressing room turned out to be a very good director. Kevin’s entire family and mine remain close: Bill, his father, whom I essentially played in the movie; his mother, Eileen; and his brothers, Michael, Darren, and Brian.

  There was a little sting attached to Brooklyn Lobster. When I saw it in the theater, the first words that popped up on-screen were “Presented by Martin Scorsese.”

  Why would Marty, who never had any use for me, put his name on the movie? He didn’t produce it, he didn’t finance it, and I never once saw the man on set. It turned out that Kevin had connected with Scorsese through their shared alma mater, NYU. That explanation didn’t help to take the sting away.

  Well, I thought ruefully, at last I am in a Martin Scorsese film.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I Just Want to Hear the Words

  When I began to have some success in movies and onstage, my mother never stopped encouraging me to pursue singing as a career. “Danny, you’re a good actor,” she said, “but I hear you sing all the time at home and I want you to be a singer.”

  It was silly, really, the shyness that kept me from letting everyone in my professional life, including my agents, know that I could sing. For a long time, the situation was just fine with me.

  But around the turn of the millennium, I began to question my own behavior. My acting career had matured. I felt a need to step back and take stock. This wasn’t a midlife crisis, more like a coming home to myself after years of denial. A question occurred to me: How much time have I wasted not doing something I would have really loved to do, if only I had the guts?

  I thought back and realized that for my whole life I had been a singer. I sang as a kid with my friends on street corners and in backyards in my old neighborhood. I sang at family weddings and birthdays. I sang at the Improvisation, belting it out to the tables and chairs in an empty club. My first appearance on the screen, in Bang the Drum Slowly, showed me singing the national anthem. I had already notched a couple songs on the Once Around soundtrack album. Taken all together, that was farther than many singers get in their entire careers.

  I also recalled that around the time I worked with Madonna on “Papa Don’t Preach,” I had a conversation with a major music executive. Seymour Stein headed up Sire Records, which was Madonna’s label. Stein saw the video for my answer song, “Papa Wants the Best for You.”

  “You should do an album,” he said.

  My shyness about singing immediately kicked in. “Me?” I said. “What the hell kind of songs would I do?”

  “Well, you should do an album of Italian music,” Stein said. “You would be a natural.”

  Here was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the music industry, with people lining up trying to get a word with him, and I turned him down flat.

  “I don’t do Italian songs,” I said. That was the end of the conversation.

  Twenty years later, I felt the same way about doing Italian songs but differently about singing. A friend of mine, Paul DeAngelo, is one of those highly energized, multitalented people who wear a lot of different hats: he was a producer, writer, director, actor, and entrepreneur. He was shooting a film of his in New Jersey, Destination Fame, with my son Rick in a featured role. While visiting the set I met a friend of Paul’s, Thomas E. van Dell, president of IN2N Recording Company (the name is pronounced “in tune”).

  Previously Tommy had been vice president at Motown Records, which was a division of Universal Music Group, one of the biggest record conglomerates in the world. Now he was out on his own with the IN2N label. He asked me the magical question.

  “Are you signed musically to anyone?”

  My first response was, “Not interested.” I told Tom about Seymour Stein’s disappointing pitch about my doing Italian music. I reminded him that throughout my years of doing Broadway shows, I had never once done a musical.

  In response, Tommy said all the right things. He didn’t mention doing Italian songs. “I saw you in Hudson Hawk,” he recalled. “You sang a couple songs, ‘Swinging on a Star’ and ‘Side by Side.’ Then in Once Around you did three: ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ ‘Glory of Love,’ and ‘Mama.’ ”

  I’ll admit I was flattered that this music industry honcho had been following
my movie career so closely. Tom was a pretty good bullshit artist. How else can you get to be a vice president of a big record company? Bullshit is a required part of the job.

  “What songs would I sing?” I asked him, intrigued now.

  “Think about the songs you remember hearing throughout your life,” he said. “Write down about fifty of them, then out of those fifty choose fifteen that will be on your album.”

  He made it sound clear-cut and straightforward. I realized I was ready to take the leap. I signed with IN2N records under the tutelage of Tommy van Dell. My publicity agent was Tracey Miller, the rep for such acts as Michael McDonald, 3 Doors Down, Amy Winehouse, and Run-DMC.

  Tracey’s husband Joe Geary became my bandleader. Our group consisted of eight people and was called Joe Geary and the Guys. In 2003 we recorded our first album, I Just Want to Hear the Words. Released in April 2004, the record hit number four on Billboard’s traditional jazz chart. I was stunned. Just ahead of me on the chart were Tony Bennett, Diana Krall, and Wynton Marsalis. Pretty good company.

  We toured behind the album, mostly in New York venues—the Rainbow Room, the Blue Note, and the Apollo—as well as casinos in Connecticut and Niagara Falls. We hit Atlantic City, appearing at the Tropicana and the Sands Casino Hotel. One of the tour’s highlights was an appearance with the Boston Pops Orchestra in Boston.

  It was inevitable that I had to come down to earth. The New York Times shot me out of the sky. After I appeared at the Regency Hotel in New York City, the newspaper printed a negative review of the show.

  “When Danny Aiello sings,” the Times critic stated, “he likes to point . . . aggressively thrusting out his arm and pointing at various audience members as though delegating a posse or ticking off a hit list.”

  Hit list? I guess the critic got me mixed up with some Mafia guy of his own imagining. But I took the shot and kept on going. We headed to the West Coast, where we played House of Blues venues in both Los Angeles and Anaheim. The Los Angeles Times was kinder: “His voice is warm and amiable, his phrasing easygoing and conversational, his singing revealed influences from his numerous idols.”

  So I was launched as a singer, and it could not have happened without Paul DeAngelo, Tracey Miller, Joe Geary, and Tommy van Dell. I felt terrific. What was the song that kicked off my debut album? None other than “All of Me,” the same number I choked on during my aborted Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts audition way back in 1946.

  Somewhere up there, I knew Mom was smiling.

  * * *

  The 2000s were turning into my musical decade. But I didn’t just sit behind a mike and sing. I was busy doing a lot of other things, too. I ran a comedy club in Hoboken, New Jersey, at the Tutta Pasta restaurant called Danny’s Upstairs. I did a couple plays, some radio shows, and lots of voice-over work, and kept my hand in with movies, doing Zeyda and the Hitman in 2004, Lucky Number Slevin in 2006, and Stiffs in 2010.

  My professional career took a forced detour at this time, when I almost died on the operating table during surgery. A close call like that can put a lot of things in perspective. I decided more than anything that I wanted to continue doing what I loved with music. I also wanted to spend as much time as I could with my children and my grandchildren. I have always been a homebody, happiest when I am with Sandy and my family.

  In 2005, I appeared with Joe Geary and the band in Atlantic City at the famed Copa Room of the Sands Casino Hotel. This was the same stage where Frank Sinatra performed his final public U.S. concert in 1994, with me and Sandy watching from the audience. I felt the history of the place tingling in my bones when we recorded one of our shows at the Copa Room.

  No one had a thought of releasing the recording of our set as a CD. It was just a way for me and the band to preserve a little history ourselves. But listening to it, we liked what we heard, and that live concert turned into my second CD release, 2008’s Live from Atlantic City. I hoped it wasn’t going to be an omen, but they demolished the Sands hotel immediately after we recorded there.

  My Christmas Song for You became my third album in 2011. I worked with an ace keyboard man named Conal Fowkes, who with Joe Geary helped me choose the songs. Conal happens to be Woody Allen’s piano player, and in all of Woody’s recent movies Conal’s exquisite keyboard work can be heard on the soundtracks. He sings, too, and provided the Cole Porter vocals in Midnight in Paris.

  Conal specializes in a great dry brand of humor. He took the brunt of many of the jokes during the Christmas Song sessions. Mostly, we marveled at the shape of his home in Nyack, New York, where we did a lot of our rehearsals. Inside, it is as comfortable as it is beautiful. Outside, it looks as if it’s about to slide into the Hudson River at any minute. If you saw Popeye with Robin Williams and remember the houses in the movie, you will know the style of rickety grandeur that I’m talking about.

  “Get the place insulated in rubber, Conal,” Joe Geary told him. “That way, when it collapses, your home will just bounce around a bit, and you and your wife will be safe.”

  When I could not think of a name for the album, Conal saved the day. He suggested we do an obscure Hoagy Carmichael tune called “My Christmas Song for You.” It’s a fine song and served as a great record title. For the cover, I used an oil painting by an artist named Jimmy Dellesio, depicting my home block on the West Side when I was growing up. Joe Spano contributed his art direction and graphic expertise on this album, as he did on the previous two.

  I always imagined my grandchildren listening while I was working on the record. I included them on the project in a quite delightful way. I did “Pocketful of Miracles” with five of my children’s children singing together on background vocals. Conal helped rehearse them and the results were sensational. There’s a slight possibility that I am biased, but I believe my grandchildren are all very talented.

  We recorded the album at “the Barber Shop” in Hopatcong, New Jersey, otherwise known as the Dream Makers recording studio. Located on the shore of beautiful Lake Hopatcong, the studio was owner-operator Scott Barber’s home away from home, and it was one of the prettiest places that you would ever want to see.

  It was a time I won’t soon forget. I loved working there, with the whole team hanging out with Scott and his beautiful wife Tracey for lunches during sunny afternoons on the deck of the studio, watching boats float by. Scott and Tracey were so positive, so enthusiastic, that they contributed greatly to the success of the project. They’ve passed their energetic approach to music to their son, Ryan, who has taken over leadership of the Dream Makers team.

  I had a problem deciding on the album’s opener. I was thinking of narrating the poem “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” (a.k.a. “A Visit from St. Nicholas”). But those verses had been done so many times that it felt a little stale.

  “Why don’t you come up with your own version?” Conal suggested. He had heard many tales about my West Side childhood and thought they would make a good holiday story. “Base it on the first Christmas you can remember as a child,” he said.

  It was many, many years ago that I was a child—probably too many, I thought. Would my first Christmas be impossible to recall?

  I lost myself in memory, scribbling out lines. Tears welled in my eyes. It all came flooding back. My first Christmas, our family trying to put together a suitable celebration for the smaller children, me included. The basement apartment; the tree my sister stole, strung with shoestrings and bottle caps; the boxing gloves that were my first Christmas present: I relived it all like it was yesterday.

  In a sense, the work I did on that album track, “Danny’s Night Before Christmas,” was the first step in writing this book. I realized that I had memories that I desperately did not want to lose. Good times, bad times, the whole parade of my life rolling past me like a grand spectacle. The Bronx and the army, the Big Grey Dog and the Improv, Broadway and Hollywood. I saw it all vanishing like a smoke ring floating up toward the ceiling. I resolved to get it down on paper before it wa
s gone forever.

  * * *

  Soon after My Christmas Song was released, a singer-songwriter and close friend of mine named Charles Lallo told me he had written a song called “Home America.” While sitting in my car in Hoboken, New Jersey, Charles played a demo of the tune. He knew I was getting ready to do another album. I didn’t know if his song would fit. As a matter of fact, at that point in time I had no idea what my next album would be. I decided to do “Home America” as a single and see what would happen.

  While recording the song at Chung King Studios, then on Varick Street in New York City, a young man approached me and said that he liked what I did in Do the Right Thing. I thanked him and was about to leave. He didn’t seem to want to let me go, asking what I was up to at the studio.

  “I’m actually recording a single,” I said. “It’s called ‘Home America,’ and it’s sort of a patriotic song.”

  “Are you producing it?” the young man asked.

  “No, I’m singing it,” I said.

  The young man told me his name was Damon Johnson, but the music industry knew him by another name, Hasan. I was impressed when he listed some of his credits. Working with Sony’s Tommy Mottola and Cory Rooney, his brother-in-law, Hasan had produced some outstanding talent in the world of rhythm and blues and rap, including Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, Mary J. Blige, and Mariah Carey. He was recording his own project at Chung King.

  I played my single for him and he was actually blown away. He played me what he had just recorded, a rap track laid over a John Mayer song called “Waiting on the World to Change.” The original did not have rap on it, but this was Hasan’s remix, not for general release but for a charity benefit.

  Hasan’s track sounded great. We met again the next day in Hoboken. We sat together in my car. He had listened to my first album the night before. We talked about teaming up. I was hesitant because of my negative feelings about rap in general, but I decided to be at least open-minded to the idea.