Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  The Heist: How a Gang Stole $8,000,000 at Kennedy Airport and Lived to Regret It, by Ernest Volkman and John Cummings, was published a year after Wiseguy, in 1986. Hill is here, as is Ed McDonald, the prosecutor. The book, which is not bad at all, draws heavily on what Hill spilled to McDonald, and paints some very different portraits from the ones that would appear in Wiseguy and be distilled into Goodfellas. “Not noted for mental organization, Hill rambled all over the place, flitting from one topic to another. But there were plenty of nuggets of gold among the worthless pebbles: stories about the fallout among members of the Robert’s Lounge gang; beatings of several men who had run afoul of the Mafia; the killing of Tommy DeSimone; the intricate pattern of betrayal among those involved in the Lufthansa heist; and for good measure, an incredible (and, given the accounts of others, probably completely untrue) story about Theresa Ferrara. Paul Vario, Sr., had been smitten by her beauty, Hill claimed, and the aging don’s infatuation led him to use her as a courier to move $3 million of the Lufthansa proceeds to Florida. Later, after discovering she was an FBI informant, Vario had her gruesomely murdered, destroying her body so that he would never again have to think of the physical beauty that had so nearly unhinged him.” It is difficult, in any event, to imagine the taciturn man-mountain Paulie Cicero of this film in thrall to sexual obsession.

  * * *

  After Goodfellas, both books were adapted into made-for-television movies. The film of The Ten Million Dollar Getaway, made for the USA Network in 1991, opens with a crooned “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” accompanying shots of outer-borough locations. Here, the distinguished British-born actor John Mahoney, of Frasier fame, plays Jimmy Burke. He seems to be grappling with the anxiety of influence here, his New York accent marked by distinctly De Niro–like inflections. His dark pompadoured hair (probably a wig) is jarring.

  Burke is the narrator here, and his voice-over, scripted by Christopher Canaan, is just...well. The Lufthansa heist was “bigger than the Great Train Robbery. Bigger than Brinks. To put that much money in your pocket normally you’d have to be a senator.” Burke introduces his crew right away. “Stacks Edwards. Sang the blues like nobody’s business and always had a story to tell.” Tommy DeSimone? “A good family man and a great shot.” As we’ve seen.

  In a bit of a jaw-dropper, Mike Starr, who plays the robbery-happy “midnight-to-eight man” Frenchy in Goodfellas, appears here as...Frenchy. Nevertheless, the whole thing plays like an SCTV parody.

  Volkman and Cummings’ book didn’t get made into a TV movie for the Ovation Network until 2001. The Big Heist opens with yes, voice-over, only the Michael Zager Band disco hit “Let’s All Chant” is playing under it as a bunch of very broad character actors enacts a truck hijacking. “That’s Louis the Whale, belly-up to the steering wheel there. He used to be a stick-up artist but he had to give it up. Everybody knew it was him!” Stacks is with us one more time: “Stacks Edwards. He thinks the girls love him for his singing. But in the morning they always ask him for money. He thinks it’s a loan.” Oh dear. The narrator continues: “Believe it or not these are the guys who would pull off,” etc., etc. Further setting the scene, he notes, “Disco was big and the streets of New York were dangerous.”

  The familiar (at least for some American film buffs) voice belongs to John Heard, who plays a detective named Wood who’s a composite largely drawn from prosecutor Edward McDonald (at the end of this movie, Henry lets slip to Wood about the Boston College point-shaving scheme, which the real-life Henry did to McDonald). Donald Sutherland plays Jimmy Burke, with a magnanimous bearing and a ridiculous leonine hairpiece, slipping in and out of an Irish accent. (While of Irish extraction, Burke was born and raised in New York.) While Mahoney allows himself to be pinned by De Niro, Sutherland aims a flamethrower at the idea that a movie called Goodfellas ever existed in the first place. The performance is no less impressive for being utterly ghastly.

  The movie itself also portrays Burke in a completely different light than the Scorsese picture: here, because of concerns about “earning” and the criminal incompetence of his son Frank, Burke is backed into masterminding and directing the heist, and then further pressured to kill his accomplices. Poor guy.

  The heist itself is scored to the Ami Stewart disco version of the R&B classic “Knock on Wood” and the dialogue is replete with gems like “I never met a dead guy yet who made a good witness” and “You bring that rat bastard to me.” Instead of “Layla” accompanying the discoveries of criminal corpses, John Paul Young’s “Love Is in the Air” plays as the tortured Jimmy is forced to preside over the murders of his beloved crew. Henry Hill, played by Nick Sandow (later of the series Orange Is the New Black; I once took Mr. Sandow’s son to the movies, it’s a longish story), is portrayed as a cocaine-addled mook who at one point is discovered in bed with a man. Because, presumably, that’s what being a cocaine-addled mook will do to a guy. This detail does not appear in Volkman and Cumming’s book, or any other book I know of, in case you were at all concerned.

  My wife, catching a few minutes of The Big Heist while I was looking at it for this chapter, spoke for many who for whatever reason have sat through the movie, I think, when she said, “I’m starting to feel embarrassed.”

  A PINK CADILLAC CHRISTMAS

  The bar is decorated in tinsel and Christmas lights and Jimmy the Gent welcomes Henry and Karen with open arms as the Phil Spector “Frosty the Snowman” plays on the jukebox. Tommy looks on proudly in the background. “Look at this genius,” Jimmy says, kissing Henry. Jimmy’s exuberance is tamped down when the next couple walks in. Johnny Roastbeef and his tall blonde wife exchange kisses and then Johnny commits a fatal mistake. He brings Jimmy to the door and shows him a pink Cadillac coupe, the sticker still in the passenger side window, and says, “Ain’t she gorgeous? I bought it for my wife. It’s a coupe. I love that car.” Jimmy pulls Johnny inside, and begins to reinstruct him as to the importance of not throwing around the heist money, which will attract the attention of cops.

  It’s easy to miss just how quickly these guys will lie their asses off to each other: Johnny almost immediately changes his story to mollify Jimmy: “It’s a wedding gift, Jimmy. It’s from my mother. It’s under her name. I just got married.” Johnny gestures to his wife. In a flat “how dare you” tone that suggests she really hasn’t heard much about Jimmy, Mrs. Roastbeef (Fran McGee) protests, “I love that car.”

  Jimmy’s simmering, then boiling, annoyance at this infraction, puts Johnny at a severe disadvantage. Johnny Williams, Roastbeef’s portrayer, was a deli owner who was part of the regular crew at Rao’s, the ultraexclusive East Harlem Italian restaurant where Scorsese and Pileggi commanded a table. “I had no résumé to speak of and didn’t even consider myself an actor,” Williams recalls on his website. Scorsese was eventually so taken with Williams that he changed the character’s name; in the script this wiseguy was supposed to be Angelo Sepe, the real name of a real-life heist participant; sometime before shooting, he was rechristened with Williams’ deli-world nickname, Johnny Roastbeef.

  In the GQ oral history of the film, Williams discussed having to play to, and off of, De Niro. “Here’s a guy who’s done 200 films, and here I am. I owned a deli up in Harlem. I don’t act. I can’t act for shit. But he needed a fuse, he needed a light, and he says, ‘Johnny, somewhere—I don’t care where it is—just tell me not to get excited.’ If you watch that scene, when I said, ‘What’re you getting excited for, Jimmy?’ that was liftoff. I gave him what he wanted. This is Robert De Niro. The line wasn’t in the script.” De Niro said in the same article, “I would hope that anything that I was doing was helping him. And he was helping me. He was very good [...]just reacting. I was the more kind of dominant, aggressive person in the scene because I was chewing him out. So all he had to do was just react, and the best thing is to do nothing and just sort of take it. And that’s how those things happen in life, you know, usually.”

&nbs
p; “Of course we relished holding on [his face] because he was just falling apart as he was being abused,” editor Thelma Schoonmaker added to that account. “It was wonderful. This guy was real: he was exactly what Marty needed for the part. Johnny Roastbeef, oh my God.”

  Illeana Douglas was particularly interested in observing De Niro, and in making a good impression on him. Speaking to GQ, she conveys the awesome impact he makes on his fellow performers who watch him in action: “You see his face, it’s like, ‘Whoa, I thought I was going to do a scene, but I didn’t know...’ And I think Bob likes to utilize something that is really happening in you. He kind of waits like an animal and sees what you’re going to do, and then it triggers something in him that is so ferocious that you’re just hanging on for dear life.”

  Williams concluded: “He’s relentless. You ever pull a thread on a sweater and found that it’s taken off the whole fucking sleeve? That’s what he did. He felt that these guys spending this money was pulling apart the whole affair. In his head, he was figuring out how he was going to get most of the money. Then you start seeing the bodies come up. That’s how nuts he was.” Williams segues from talking about De Niro to discussing Jimmy himself. Jimmy hammers into Roastbeef until the whole room is stunned into silence. Even Tommy is impressed. Jimmy barely bothers to lay into Frankie Carbone; he just strips his wife’s fur coat off and sends them into the cold.

  De Niro, in his script notes, took care to underscore Jimmy’s defensive and paranoid view of the crew members—he will next go up against Morrie, who is insisting, “I need the money.”

  Low’s performing ebullience got the better of him at times, according to Joseph Reidy. “In the scene with Chuck Low as Morrie, hassling Jimmy and Henry, saying, ‘I want my money, I want my money,’ Chuck overdid it with a gesture and he hit Ray. Chuck wasn’t a trained actor, and that’s the kind of thing that happens in such a situation, he was not controlling himself and he went too far. And he hit Ray and cut him, and Ray had to go to the hospital, and we had to wait for Ray to come back from the hospital. I think Ray was okay, but a bit pissed off that that had happened, and it was kind of a tense set from then on, for that scene. It should be different now, maybe; in this day and age, it shouldn’t happen. And I have a feeling that subsequently a lot of the actors sort of treated Chuck like they treated his character.”

  Jimmy retreats into a back room, with Henry following. Once Jimmy’s away from Morrie, he’s beaming, with a wad of cash in hand. He’s giving Henry “just a little taste” of his “share,” wetting the beak so to speak. In his notes to the script, De Niro wrote, “I’m really happy to give it to him!” As delighted as he is, he gives Henry a friendlier version of the “don’t spend it” lecture. There’s then a pointed cut to Henry bursting into his home saying, “Karen! Judy! Ruth! C’mere! I bought the most expensive tree they had!”

  This scene was Illeana Douglas’ first day on the picture. She’s at this celebration as Tommy’s date, and in the movie’s final tracking shot down a bar, which starts in tight on the two glasses in which Stacks is doing some liquor magic—“This drink here is better than sex, babe,” he says as he pours two shots into two almost-already-full cordial glasses—she’s instructed by Tommy, who’s going to join Stacks, to “look straight ahead or I’ll fucking kill you.” But he walks away smiling, so who knows.

  Here’s Douglas’ account of her first takes, recounted in her memoir (in an email exchange about the quote, Douglas made a few changes to it—“always the writer,” she said—and I’ve kept those): “I had a front-row seat watching Robert De Niro. Enough time to get pretty nervous because my first line in Goodfellas was coming up. We had been shooting in the bar a few days, and there was going to be this very long, complicated tracking shot, and I had a line during it to Julie Garfield, referring to my relationship with Joe Pesci, which was, ‘If I even look at anyone else, he’ll kill me.’ The camera then holds for our reaction, and then moves on to De Niro and Joe Pesci, and the scene continues. It was like an eight-minute shot. We rehearsed it all day. And this is on film, remember. Finally Marty said they were ready to shoot. And even though I had told myself, Don’t screw this shot up. Don’t do anything phony. Don’t do anything that makes Robert De Niro go over to Marty and say, ‘How did that bad actor get in my movie?’ The first thing I did was try to get a laugh. I thought, Let me goose my one line in the scene like a bad actor. So the camera starts on Sam Jackson, it’s tracking along, there are twenty people in the frame, all these actions. Out of the corner of my eye I see the camera getting to me, and all of a sudden I become Eve Arden. ‘If he catches me with anyone he’ll kill me!’ then I downed a glass of wine to button it. It was dreadful, of course, awful and hammy. I knew it immediately, and so did Marty. He yelled out, ‘Cut. Cut. Technical difficulties.’ Everyone started groaning. Marty came over to me and whispered into my ear so that no one could hear it but me: ‘Don’t do that again.’ Then he laughed, ‘Sorry, everyone, sorry,’ running back to the camera. ‘Our fault. Our fault. Technical problems.’ Twenty-thousand-dollar mistake, Marty later told me. He never let anyone know but me, but he cared enough that he wanted every actor in the frame to be perfect.”

  The exchange with Julie Garfield is all the more mordantly funny because of Garfield’s response: Douglas’ Rosie says, “He’s so jealous. I mean, if I even look at anyone else, he’ll kill me,” and Garfield, as Mickey Conway, Jimmy’s wife (who is never introduced as such in the film), says, “Great!” The camera doesn’t move to Pesci—who’s talking to Stacks—but tracks De Niro and Liotta, walking behind them, and then finding some space at the bar, where they are accosted by Morrie, who ends his demands by repeating, “Poison my eyes,” such is his frustration. The origins of this evocative phrase are unclear.

  * * *

  After bringing in that most expensive tree, Henry gives Karen a jewelry box wrapped in gold paper, and a passionate kiss. (One recalls her holding a gun on Henry while admitting in voice-over, “I still found him very attractive.”) Henry then hands her a thick wad of hundreds and adds, “Happy Hanukkah,” which gets a raucous laugh from her. There’s a nicely centered shot of the kids sitting at the foot of the Christmas tree. It’s a faux tree, all white, with purple orbs the sole ornaments. The camera tracks in until only a few branches and a single purple ball are in the frame. In voice-over Henry reflects on the caper: “Lufthansa should have been the ultimate score. The heist of a lifetime. Six million in cash. More than enough to go around.” On the soundtrack is the song “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” a doo-wop version by the Drifters, the B-side to their 1954 single “White Christmas.” Written in 1917, the song was subsequently featured, and repopularized, in the 1945 film of the same name, directed by Leo McCarey and starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. That movie was a nostalgic touchstone for many directors of Scorsese’s generation. Not just that—Scorsese, and his contemporaries, hold director McCarey in high regard, as did the old French master Jean Renoir, who said, “Leo McCarey understood people better than any other director in Hollywood.” Michael (Al Pacino) and Kay (Diane Keaton) see the movie at Radio City Music Hall in The Godfather. The semiotics of this music choice in this Goodfellas scene are practically fraught.

  The plaintive vocals of the Drifters continue as Stacks Edwards is roused from his slumber by Tommy DeSimone’s insistent knocking and squawking. Stacks is haggard and nonchalant as he gets the door.

  CUTTING EVERY LINK

  The weary Stacks receives Tommy and Frankie, and Tommy barks at Frankie to start some coffee as he follows Stacks into his bedroom.

  “I thought you had one of your bitches in here.” Tommy, always with a pleasant word. Too tired to register the vitriol, Stacks says, “I thought I did, too, where is she?”

  Using an automatic with a long silencer attached, Tommy shoots Stacks through the back of the neck after telling him, “You’ll be late for your own funeral.”

  The stagi
ng here is not realistic. After the blood and brain spatters on the mattress, Jackson actually throws himself off the chair, left arm outstretched, upper part of his torso bouncing off the bed, landing on the floor. Carbone, hearing the first shot, comes into the doorway and watches Tommy shoot Stacks three more times.

  In a very sour reiteration of the “take the cannoli” bit in The Godfather, Tommy, noticing the pot in Frankie’s hand, says, “Make that coffee to go,” and when Frankie makes to follow Tommy out of the apartment holding the pot, Tommy tells him, “It’s a joke!” They leave the apartment. The cut is to black.

  * * *

  The film does something odd at this point. Scorsese made the audience watch the stabbing and shooting death of Billy Batts twice. Now he reiterates the appallingly cold-blooded murder of Stacks, but in a way that contradicts the prior account. The Drifters’ tender religious-themed song fades back in on the soundtrack.

  The black field moves. It’s the back of Tommy’s coat. (Alfred Hitchcock similarly used fields of black that were revealed as characters’ clothing in his experimental 1948 feature Rope, in which he attempted to simulate a single long shot without any cuts; technology at the time allowed only for ten-minute takes so such trickery was necessary to create an idea, at least, of seamlessness.) Light comes in from the right side of the frame and the room swims into view. There are speckles of blood on a wall behind Tommy. It’s a low-angle shot, you see the gun in his hand. In slow motion he turns to the right. His face is impassive. He raises his right arm. He fires the gun. The slow motion lets you see the fire coming out of the silencer, and the shots have a thudding percussive echo. And Tommy fires five times, not the three that Carbone observes. And he walks away.