Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  A little while after this first interview, De Fina got in touch. She wanted to meet again. We set a date for June.

  * * *

  “When you called about Goodfellas, in a way you just kicked a hornets’ nest for me. Because I didn’t want to sit back and say everything that’s already been said. This is the opportunity to do whatever I can do to set it straight, or to be truthful, I don’t know; as I told you I was thinking of writing my story. If there’s a time to do it, it’s now. Because I went through the ’80s and ’90s in a position I should not have been in.

  “I mean, I love the movie, we had a great time making it and, you know, if I had gotten proper credit, it would have changed my life a lot. I mean, there’s a British Academy Award, there’s the Academy Award nominations... I think things would have been different.”

  Scorsese and Pileggi had collaborated on the script; Scorsese made The Last Temptation of Christ first, nevertheless, because that deal came together in a “now or never” fashion. De Fina picks up the thread from there:

  “So we came back, we had the script, and we started, you know, prepping, and even in Morocco doing Temptation we were talking music, we talked about what to put on the end credits, the crazy ‘My Way’ by Sid Vicious thing. When we got back, I started producing the movie, and Irwin Winkler wasn’t around. Marty had at this time other lawyers, which I wasn’t aware of, separate lawyers, which was a problem. And so these lawyers sent out deal letters and somehow Irwin had gotten himself into it with, also through Ovitz—who deny, deny, denies it—they got Irwin in the picture. Which would have been fine, but after I had started the movie, started producing it, we started, you know, doing all the work, Irwin got me, like, demoted.”

  It should be noted here that Winkler had, sometime prior, acquired the movie rights to Pileggi’s Wiseguy. This happened during the interstice that De Fina described, during which Scorsese and his assistant were calling Pileggi without De Fina’s knowledge. Had she known this was going on, De Fina said, she would have made the correct calls. But as it happens, those calls were made, successfully, by Irwin Winkler.

  And as Winkler himself told me, this was during a period, after his partnership with Robert Chartoff had dissolved, in which Winkler did not share the credit of “Producer.” Scorsese’s manager Harry Ufland had pushed for a “Producer” credit on Goodfellas and Winkler flat out said no. He had the power to do that because he had control of the book’s movie rights. De Fina’s credit was changed to “Executive Producer.” Additionally, once CAA got into it, her profit participation points on the movie were decreased.

  Recounting the situation thirty years after the fact, De Fina fumes. “He just—I mean, I—and everyone else that had been working on it. And then he wasn’t even there. He visited the set a few times, got his picture taken in the director’s chair.”

  In an interview prior to my second session with De Fina, Winkler readily allowed that he did not visit the set frequently. Joseph Reidy told me that as a rule Scorsese doesn’t like having producers on his set. De Fina was there relatively frequently—on the audio commentary for the twenty-fifth anniversary Blu-ray of Goodfellas, she speaks of enjoying the atmosphere, camaraderie, and even some of the craziness, while in person she told me while she did enjoy it she did so “within limits”—but the biggest presence from the production department was the customary one, the unit production manager, Bruce Pustin. Who, Reidy recalls, often served the function of “bad cop,” which is also the customary one for an individual in this position.

  De Fina said that Winkler was, and has been, “nothing but nasty” to her. She told the story of a party that Winkler and his wife, Margo, attended; on seeing Barbara, Margo said, “The two producers are here,” and Winkler responded with words to the effect that there was only one producer. (De Fina retains affection for Margo, whom she calls “lovely.”) Winkler denies making the remark, and denies snubbing De Fina, or denying her invitations to Goodfellas-commemorating events.

  * * *

  As for Scorsese, De Fina recalls, “The only thing he ever said to me about the whole thing, when it happened, was that he didn’t think the movie would come to anything.”

  * * *

  Winkler’s responses to De Fina’s assertions are polite and brief. “Barbara did a great job, as I said the first time we spoke. This production was thirty years ago, and at that time ‘Executive Producer’ was a real credit—it wasn’t like these days when they give out Executive Producer credits like candy. If she feels that way, I can only repeat, she did a great job, and I have great admiration for what she did. As you mentioned, at that time I did not share ‘Producer’ credit, and the reason I could take producer credit was because I did what a producer does—I tracked down the right agents, who referred me to CAA, and I bought the rights to the property.”

  * * *

  In the entertainment industry, personal and professional relationships often bleed into each other, and are often sundered with near-extreme prejudice. Brad Pitt’s film production company, Plan B, a prominent and successful entity as of this writing, was originally a joint venture between Pitt and his then-wife, Jennifer Aniston. When they broke up, Aniston was unattached from the company, which went on to back Scorsese’s The Departed, 12 Years a Slave, and more.

  In the case of De Fina and Scorsese, the decision to maintain the professional relationship after the marriage had dissolved was perhaps not the best one, despite the fact that it yielded some classic pictures, among them The Age of Innocence and Casino. It was during work on Casino that De Fina saved the production oodles of money by concocting a way to shoot in working casinos, cordoning off certain sections during the wee hours, instead of constructing sets to simulate them. On these films and others, De Fina did receive sole credit as producer. But De Fina holds that Goodfellas was one that mattered in a different way.

  * * *

  The Scorsese–De Fina marriage was troubled before Goodfellas—in our second formal interview De Fina upgraded “he had his demons” to “endless womanizing”—and the professional relationship took further hits once Scorsese signed with Artists Management Group, the company Mike Ovitz formed after leaving CAA, in 1997. She likens her situation to that of Tommy James, who, after entreating boss/father figure Morris Levy to pay him, would be doled out money on which to tour and record, but no greater spoils. That is, “I got paid for each individual movie but I never got any deal money. And once Marty signed with AMG, the guys there were really tough on me, they wanted to get rid of me. I could write ten chapters on that. Ovitz is strange. He wouldn’t stand up for me on Goodfellas, he wanted me gone at AMG, but he gave me an overhead deal at Disney.”

  De Fina made the decision to step away for good once the ogre/mogul Harvey Weinstein became a participant in Gangs of New York. “I knew that I would not live through having to be the go-between in this situation,” she says. “Oddly enough, prior to my stepping away, Harvey was always kind of pleasant to me.” Settlements made between De Fina and Scorsese during both personal and professional separations meant that she would get credit on projects on which she had been involved with development—hence, her credit on Silence, the physical production of which she had no involvement in—and, in her account, right off the bat these agreements were not honored to her satisfaction.

  “No Direction Home, the Dylan documentary. That started as a joint project, so I was supposed to get a credit, and he wouldn’t let me work on it. I started on it, but then he wouldn’t let me work on it. And I was supposed to get a producer credit, and when it finally came out, we saw the credits, I had gotten some peripheral executive production credit. And this was the first thing under the agreement. I wound up having to sue the production company. And it went on for, like, five years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which—because he also then wanted to renegotiate everything—we finally settled, but it took years and years. And I think that was sort of the kind of nail i
n the coffin.”

  * * *

  While De Fina appears in some short documentaries about the making of Goodfellas, and the making of Casino, and contributes pertinently to the audio commentary of the former film, her sense that she’s been written out of a part of film history is not unsupported, to say the least. In the November 1991 issue of Premiere magazine, Peter Biskind contributed a set-visit feature on Cape Fear, which not only doesn’t mention producer De Fina once, but contains a long bit in which Biskind contemplates how Scorsese’s work ethic has affected his personal life. Scorsese speaks of divesting himself of personal “complication,” which I imagine must have looked odd to one of Cape Fear’s actors, Illeana Douglas, who was dating the director at the time: “Your personal life, you know, you deal with it as best you can. But you even divest that. All the way up until, I’d say, ’84, ’85, every Sunday my mother and father, my friends, would come over. We’d have a big Italian dinner. Whatever different marriages—whatever was going on. It was really good, like the Italian family that I remember growing up. But I don’t expect much from people anymore, and I don’t really want them to expect much from me. Except when it comes to the work.”

  In the book Scorsese on Scorsese, Scorsese related how Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight came into being out of a lunch that he arranged with Irwin Winkler and director Bertrand Tavernier. “Which [movie] Bertrand asked me to be in,” Scorsese said, “because he said that when I open my mouth, it’s New York. I would save him a lot of establishing shots! He told me, ‘You have to play the owner of the club because he’s just like you, he’s a nice guy, but he’s ruthless.’ I said, ‘Gee, thanks.’”

  In the introduction to Michael Powell’s Million Dollar Movie, Scorsese pays moving tribute to his mentor while also hinting at the way in which moviemaking can be a kind of sickness: “He reassured that in me most of all. You believe in an idea, a concept, a story, a statement you want to make, and that’s the foundation of the film. You do not waver from it. Whether it takes you all the way down, whether it takes you to the edge, then pushes you off, even to the point of not making another film for thirty years, you do not waver. You’d better make that picture even if you know it’s suicide.”

  * * *

  I do not think that Lisa Caserta will object to my calling her a character. I got her number from Edward McDonald, who told me that she had been Henry Hill’s companion and manager for the last ten years of his life. He thought that Lisa might be able to put me in touch with Karen Hill.

  When we first connected, we spoke on the phone for a good thirty minutes. I was only calling to give her my email address, so we could conduct communications that way. I explained who I was and what I was doing. She told me that she had kept Henry sober for the last ten years of his life. This didn’t square with what I had gleaned, but as others said, and Lisa eventually allowed, keeping Henry sober was a frequently provisional process at best.

  I got the impression that since Henry’s death in 2012, Lisa had been doing what Colonel Tom Parker said he was going to do after Elvis died: that is, go right on managing him. That said, she has always been completely aboveboard with me; she’s made queries with respect to certain opportunities, but never asked for compensation for cooperation.

  Still, it’s been kind of a trip working with her. We’ve had about a half dozen conversations in which she’s been generous and kind and chatty, and I have always ended them by saying, “Remember to email me,” and she never emails me.

  When Karen comes up, Caserta’s natural ebullience sometimes plummets. “She’s scared” or “She’s scared for the kids” were two things I heard. I proposed using McDonald as a go-between to establish my own bona fides and good faith, but because of the frazzled nature of our exchanges, we never moved forward with the process.

  When we texted in mid-February of 2020, Caserta said she was changing residences, and that it would be difficult to talk for a while. Then, out of the blue, she offered me the phone number of Joe Hill, Henry’s brother. Henry was one of six children, but only his youngest brother Michael (Henry was born in 1943, Joe 1944, and Michael in 1950) is depicted in the book Wiseguy and the film Goodfellas.

  “That was all worked out beforehand,” Joe Hill said, his friendly voice still New Yawk–accented despite decades spent on the West Coast, when I called him a few days later. “None of us wanted any part of that.” Joe tells me that Michael died in 1987—“the day after my first grandchild was born”—after the book was published, but of course before the movie. “At that time, he was the oldest surviving spina bifida patient in America. And that was because of the good medical care we were provided through my dad’s union affiliations.”

  Joe has vivid memories of the people Henry knew as a kid, and grew up emulating, because Joe knew them, too. “My impression of that time is closer to what Chazz Palminteri did in A Bronx Tale, the closer depiction of how every Italian American neighborhood was run by an underboss whose main function, as we saw it, was to protect the neighborhood. And put money into legitimate businesses. Every little ’hood, those guys had control and gave protection. You see a lot of envelopes passed into the hand, to the local precinct commander, say. Wiseguy was Henry’s version of it. Nick [Pileggi] did a wonderful job of translating it. The movie Hollywoodized it up a bit.”

  Joe Hill did admire the picture’s depiction of addiction. He contends that Henry’s subsequent, seemingly intractable problems with alcohol and drugs arose from his trauma at being backed into a corner from which the only exit was the betrayal of his wiseguy family. “Henry’s alcoholism and drug abuse was perpetuated by the fact that he just never reconciled the fact that he had to do that. It wasn’t just the friendships that factored in, either. The five Vario brothers, they were men of respect not just among the Italian community, the Jewish community; Henry retained his childhood admiration for them.”

  The brother also takes issue with Henry’s, and the movie’s, portrayal of their father. Henry Hill, Sr., was an electrical engineer for Tishman, the New York construction giant. “He helped put up the Trade Center. In fact, he put off retiring so he could get them finished. Every twenty or thirty floors they’d have a party for the workers. Barrels of beer and cocktails. These were extraordinary workers and craftsmen.

  “Henry lived more in fear of punishment than what he actually received. Yes, the belt had a place in parenting then. It was convention. I saw my share of it. Henry used to give me up more than anything. But my dad wasn’t angry with Henry. Disappointed with him, yes.”

  Hill mentioned to me that when Henry died, one of the sisters, Lucille, gave her local paper an interview corroborating this.

  Sure enough, in the June 14, 2012, Tampa Bay Times is an item, “A sister mourns ‘goodfella’ Henry Hill in Spring Hill,” in which Lucille Hill, now Lucille Chrisafulle, says that their father wasn’t abusive, merely very frustrated with Henry. The boy was his dad’s namesake, after all.

  Lucille also remarks that their neighborhood was “actually [...] very safe” on account of the wiseguys, and that Goodfellas “couldn’t show [Jimmy Burke] as bad as he really was. If you ever met pure evil, it was that man.” (This observation may come in handy if you’re ever wanting to take the “yes” side in the “Would Jimmy Have Killed Tommy Had It Come Down to It?” debate popular with some of the movie’s fans.)

  Their absence from both the book and the movie has managed, Joe Hill says, to keep much of the family happily inoculated from unwanted attention. When he traveled to Ireland it was his name’s match with that of the labor organizer that was most remarked upon, he told me. A family leitmotif has been to “keep the children from discussing Uncle Henry.” But an occasional niece or nephew will discover the movie and have to be walked through the actual situation.

  As for Henry, in his book Gangsters and Goodfellas he recounts that he had to rely on Joe quite a bit once he parked himself in Hollywood, after the movie was mad
e. Joe recalls his brother once blurting, “All I wanna be is the best fucking drunk in the world.” Hill credits Lisa for a great deal: not only for helping Henry get straight sometimes, but for engineering a genuine reconciliation with Henry and his children. Joe observes, with an affectionate chuckle, that “Henry gets credit for writing or cowriting five books, and he’d only ever read three books in his life!” Nevertheless, Joe says, “He was very intelligent. And as they used to say, he was a good earner.”

  Finally I asked Joe about Karen. He told me they have not been in direct touch for a bit, and that she has been dealing with health issues. “On the advice of Gregg, she doesn’t really talk to people about that time of her life. Gregg’s attitude about the whole thing is ‘enough is enough.’”

  Ten

  FROM GOODFELLAS TO THE IRISHMAN

  “I thought of it as being a kind of attack,” Scorsese told Richard Schickel about Goodfellas. “Attacking the audience. I remember talking about it at one point and saying, ‘I want people to get infuriated about it.’ I wanted to seduce everybody into the movie and into the style. And then just take them apart with it. I guess I wanted to make a kind of angry gesture.”

  “Why were you angry?” Schickel countered. Scorsese’s response is long and varied, but “I get angry about the way things are and the way people are” kind of sums it up.

  * * *

  But Goodfellas did not infuriate its audience. Some made objections to its violence, some to the portions with which Scorsese wanted to “seduce” viewers, but there was not, in the main, a reaction similar to Russell Baker’s.