The Don Con

by Richard Armstrong

  “He’s just below them,” said David. “Or maybe he’s on top by now. A lot of those guys you mentioned are in jail. On account of RICO. The good news is that there isn’t much left of the Philadelphia mob anymore. Most of them are dead or in prison.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “It looks like Tony Rosetti isn’t one of them.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “There’s a website.”

  I looked at David for a moment. Here was a guy who spent a lot of time in front of a computer screen. I had no doubt he knew what he was talking about.

  “Who are you having lunch with, by the way?” he asked.

  “Jeremiah Pennington.”

  “Whoa!”

  For the first time since I met David that morning, he seemed impressed with my star power. Or at least my star power by proxy. “Can you get his autograph for me?”

  “I can get you my autograph. Hand me a photo.”

  “No, seriously. If you got me his autograph, I’d be your slave forever.”

  “You’re already my slave for the weekend, David.”

  “Seriously. Can you get it?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile, let’s finish up with these people in line now. Then I’ve got to go meet Jerry.”

  “You call him Jerry? Holy shit!”

  “I should’ve known you were a Trekkie, David.”

  “I sure am. All the way back to TOS.”

  TOS meant The Original Series in Trek-speak.

  “By the way, Mr. Volpe, what are you going to do if Rosetti comes back later like he said?”

  “I don’t think he’s coming back. But if he does, I’ll come up with some act. I’ll fake like I’m sick or something.”

  That’s what actors do, after all, right?

  4

  You must be wondering how a B celebrity like myself—oh, let’s face it, a D-minus celebrity like myself—makes a living selling autographs at pop-culture fan conventions.

  The simple answer is I don’t make a living at it. Not by a long shot. Which has caused some friction between my wife and me. But it helps keep me out of the poorhouse. I can make a thousand dollars a day at one of these Fan-Cons. Usually, there are two days of autograph sessions. I’ll bring home about two thousand for the weekend. And it’s all cash so I don’t have to declare it.

  If there were a Fan-Con every weekend, I’d be okay. But I can only book about ten or twelve of these conventions a year, so I’m flirting with the poverty line. My wife has been making noises about applying for food stamps. Every once in a while, sponsors invite me to do a panel discussion with other actors, and they give me an extra fee for that. Usually, another five hundred bucks or so.

  The bigger stars, like Jeremiah Pennington, for example, make plenty more than I do. They not only make more in the autograph room, but they make more for panel discussions, too. The sponsors bend over backward to give them all sorts of free stuff—from fruit baskets in their hotel rooms to limousine rides from the airport. I, on the other hand, have to apply for the privilege of appearing at one of these conventions. To add insult to injury, I have to pay an application fee. I pay my own expenses to and from the airport and pay for my own hotel room, too. I usually can’t afford to stay in the same hotel as the convention because it’s so packed with nerds and geeks that the rack rate goes up. I have to find a Motel 6 (or a friend’s couch) twenty miles away.

  Which brings up the next question you’re probably asking yourself right now. Why would someone pay for the autograph of an actor who hit the high watermark of his career when he had three walk-on roles in The Sopranos and a small recurring role on another cable television series that nobody ever saw?

  My answer to that question is: Your guess is as good as mine!

  There doesn’t seem to be a celebrity in the country who can’t make money signing autographs at a Fan-Con. One time I was signing autographs next to the girl … well, the elderly lady who played Janet Leigh’s body double in Psycho. Back in 1960, legitimate starlets like Janet Leigh wouldn’t dream of appearing nude—even though you couldn’t see anything other than the small of her back and maybe the crack of her ass. So they hired this woman to portray Janet Leigh’s naked butt. Fifty years later the line to get her autograph at thirty-five bucks a pop stretched out the door and into the hall. Can you believe it?

  Heck, can you believe that people pay thirty-five bucks for my autograph?

  I got into this whole acting thing by accident. I wanted to be a college professor like my dad. Not Italian literature, though. I wanted to be an English professor. I grew up a skinny kid who couldn’t play sports so I spent most of my childhood reading. My parents let me read anything I wanted on the theory that reading would be better for me than watching TV. Even at the age of twelve or thirteen, they’d let me read “adult” novels, true-crime stories, and all sorts of trashy stuff. But my father would urge me to elevate my taste.

  Dad would catch me reading some soft-core porn novel and say, “You like titillating novels, Joey? Try Lolita by Nabokov. Or Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. You like crime stories? Try Dostoevsky. That’s the good stuff.”

  And so I did.

  By the time I was ready for college, I’d read everything worth reading in the canon of English literature from Chaucer to Cheever. Maybe that’s why I scored a perfect 800 on the verbal part of my SATs. I got 540 on the math part, though. Which is probably why I didn’t get into my first-choice school, Swarthmore, and had to settle for Haverford, my second choice. Living in the Philadelphia area, both were commuter schools for me.

  Haverford was an all-boys school at the time. Having graduated from an all-boys prep school, I yearned to socialize with members of the opposite sex. The only way to do that at Haverford was to take part in one of the extracurricular activities we shared with our sister school, Bryn Mawr. There was no better activity for that purpose than the theater.

  Problem was, I didn’t know diddly-squat about the theater and had no interest in it. I’d read all the classic plays, especially Shakespeare. But I knew nothing about acting, directing, lighting, makeup, or any of that stuff. When I was a kid, grown-ups (especially my mom’s friends) gushed about how good-looking I was and said, “You should go to Hollywood when you grow up.”

  I thought I looked kind of weird. The strange combination of olive skin, pale blue eyes, and black curly hair was so different from any of my classmates I felt like a freak. I guess some people found it appealing.

  In the fall of my freshman year, with nothing more on my mind than finding a way to meet girls, I showed up at the open auditions held by Haverford and Bryn Mawr to cast all the plays for the coming year. I arrived clutching a copy of King Lear, with Lear’s mad scene on the heath highlighted in yellow ink. I knew so little about casting I thought it was appropriate for a seventten-year-old Italian kid with blue eyes and curly black hair to read for the part of King Lear.

  Yet when I took the stage and began reading, I felt a powerful surge of energy take over my body. “Blow winds and crack your cheeks,” I shouted in a voice that didn’t sound like my own. “Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes …”

  I felt like a demon had taken over me, expressing anger, bitterness, and self-pity I didn’t know I had. It took me less than a minute to read the famous soliloquy. When it ended there was a stunned silence, with no one more stunned than myself.

  Then came a burst of applause from the audience that struck me like a shotgun blast. Not just the sound of it, I could actually feel the wind on my face. I stumbled back to my seat in the theater, where the other actors about to give their audition were waiting nervously. One of them tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Awesome reading, dude.”

  Afterward, no fewer than a dozen good-looking Bryn Mawr girls came up to me to say how much they enjoyed my reading. They asked me where I was from. Where I went to high school. What other plays I’d done. They seemed amazed when I said the answer was non
e.

  I could get used to this, I thought.

  A few professors who were directing plays in the upcoming season stopped to say hello. “I’m directing Othello in the spring,” said a man in a corduroy jacket with patches on the sleeves. “I think you might be right for Iago. Would you be willing to read for that part later on?”

  Othello was set in Venice. Iago was a smooth-tongued, smarmy, Machiavellian villain. Here was a guy who knew something about casting.

  So I did play Iago the following spring. It turned out to be a big success. Altogether, I must’ve been in five plays that year and in each succeeding year, too. Haverford didn’t offer a degree in theater back then. It was strictly an extracurricular activity. So I wound up majoring in English after all, like I planned. But I fell in love with the theater at college. Soon it became much more than just a way to meet girls. By the time I graduated, I knew it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

  Then I made a terrible mistake.

  Instead of heading for Hollywood, I allowed my father, a lifelong academic, to convince me to get an MFA at Yale.

  “With a graduate degree from a prestigious university, you can always teach if things don’t work out,” he said.

  “Those who can’t …” I almost replied. But I had to admit he had a point.

  So I spent two years at Yale, where I learned such vital skills as how to position my hands and feet when acting in a Restoration comedy. How to practice my enunciation before a performance: “What a to-do to die today at a minute or two to two.” And why I should never refer to Shakespeare’s Macbeth by its proper name, but as “The Scottish Play.” (Bad luck, you know.)

  The only good thing that happened to me at Yale was that I met my wife there. I met her doing Romeo and Juliet. I played Romeo. She was Juliet. Can you believe it? Can you think of anything more romantic than that? Or anything more clichéd?

  Funny thing is, I didn’t think Caitlin was all that pretty at first. She was cute as hell. But she had the kind of face that was better suited for sitcoms—like Julia Louis-Dreyfuss or Amy Poehler. Not the drop-dead beauty you want to cast as Juliet.

  I remember saying to a friend when the cast list appeared on the bulletin board in the drama department, “Is that the best-looking girl they could find at Yale? They should’ve opened the audition to the townies.”

  “What a great idea,” said my friend. “A biracial Romeo and Juliet!”

  He was referring to the fact that many of the townies in New Haven were African-American. (It wasn’t such a bad idea at all. It would’ve given the Montagues and Capulets another reason to hate each other.) But we were doing a more traditional Romeo and Juliet, set in Verona, Italy. Which is probably why I got the role in the first place.

  At any rate, I wasn’t all that impressed with Caitlin until we started rehearsals. But it didn’t take long for her to impress me. For one thing, she was a terrific actress. Charismatic. Charming. Captivating. She was one of those performers who lit up the stage as soon as she made an entrance. She could recite Shakespearean couplets as naturally as most people could chat with their best friend. The biggest challenge when it comes to performing Shakespeare is to help the audience understand what’s being said. The language is so foreign to the modern ear. Caitlin could do that as well as anyone I’d ever seen—including Gielgud, Olivier, Branagh, and all the other Shakespearean pezzonovanti.

  So Caitlin and I fell in love. We couldn’t even wait until we graduated to get married. We held the ceremony right in New Haven in the chapel at Yale. Both the campus and the town were enchanted by the fact that Romeo and Juliet got married. The Yale Daily News and even the New Haven Register wrote our story. We were the toast of the town for a while. Then we graduated and we had to face the cold, cruel world of show business armed with nothing but two worthless MFA degrees. That’s when we made our second big mistake:

  We moved to New York City.

  If there are any budding actors reading this, let me give you some advice. Please, please, please don’t move to New York City. Move to Los Angeles. That’s where the jobs are. There’s hardly any work in New York for actors anymore. Not unless you’re a good enough singer and dancer to work in a chorus line.

  I couldn’t dance to save my life. Even a simple two-step would get my feet so tangled up I’d trip and fall. And Caitlin? She was the worst singer I ever heard in my life. Her speaking voice was like a melody. But as soon as she tried to sing, she sounded like a stray cat in the alley.

  So what’s left for an actor in New York who can’t sing or dance? Not much. A handful of legitimate dramas appear on Broadway and off-Broadway every year. Most of them close within a month or two. They tend to have small casts to save on production costs, and your chances of landing one of those roles are next to nil. There’s almost no television production left in New York, except for news programs. And movies? Well, Hollywood directors love to set their movies in New York, but they do their casting out of Los Angeles. Hell, even most television commercials cast in Hollywood these days.

  So most actors in New York spin their wheels by doing off-off-Broadway, or Equity Showcases. The idea is to showcase your talent in a nonsalaried production in the hope that an agent might wander in and sign you up. You’ve got a better chance of getting discovered hanging out at a drugstore like Lana Turner than doing an off-off-Broadway show.

  Nothing was happening for either Caitlin or me in New York for year after year. We sent out our résumés to agents and casting directors asking them to see our showcases, but they never came. I kept telling Caitlin that something would break for us. But she was more pessimistic than I was. She had two clocks running out on her.

  Her biological clock was ticking because she wanted to have children someday. (She spent most of her thirtieth birthday crying in the bathroom.) And she had the female actor’s clock running, too. If you’re an actress who hasn’t made it by the time you’re thirty, your chances of becoming a star go from small to vanishingly small. But when things were looking their bleakest, something good happened …

  The Sopranos.

  HBO came up with a new television series about the modern-day Mafia and—guess what?—they decided to film it in New York City! At Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens. The word went out to casting directors that they needed dozens, scores, no hundreds of New York actors of Italian descent to cast this new show.

  The news triggered a veritable dragnet for Italian-American actors in New York City. I got calls from agents and casting directors I hadn’t contacted in years. I could almost see them going through their files—probably their trash cans, too—looking for postcards and résumés from actors with names ending in a vowel.

  I tried out for some of the big parts and most of the smaller roles. The casting director and associate producers must’ve liked me because they kept calling me back. Sometimes I’d get pretty far along in the process, two or three callbacks. But something was holding me back. You know what it was?

  It was my goddamned blue eyes!

  Every time I auditioned, some assistant casting director or associate producer would say, “So how does someone named Joseph Volpe get pale blue eyes like those?”

  And I’d say something like this:

  “My dad was born in Genoa and moved here when he was five. But he fell in love with a Norwegian from Minnesota. Opposites attract, I guess. So the recessive gene kicked in, and I wound up with the baby blues.”

  During one audition I could overhear two of the casting assistants arguing in fierce little whispers.

  “Frank Sinatra had blue eyes.”

  “We’re casting gangsters here, not saloon singers.”

  “Yeah, well, some people think Sinatra was a gangster. Besides, the kid is a good actor. He’s got an MFA from Yale, for heaven’s sake.”

  “It doesn’t look right. David won’t like it. I’d rather not bring this guy to him or he’ll get angry.”

  David was David Chase, the creator, d
irector, producer, writer and, show runner on The Sopranos. The show was his baby and he made all the important decisions. He made most of the unimportant ones, too.

  Finally there was a decision about casting that was so unimportant the casting directors didn’t worry about what David Chase would think. A one-line role. So they gave it to me. I think it was their way of thanking me for all those heartbreaking auditions when I came within an eyelash (literally) of landing a big part.

  Do I regret being born with blue eyes? Naaah. You’ve got to take the good with the bad in life. Those eyes helped me score with every decent-looking girl at Bryn Mawr.

  You’re probably wondering which part I finally landed on The Sopranos. That’s what everyone wonders! They always get it wrong.

  My part was so small that if you were a Talmudic scholar when it comes to The Sopranos—and believe me, there are such people—you wouldn’t remember it. So I’m not even going to bother trying to explain it. Let it suffice to say that if you blinked, you missed it. Telling the truth about what role I played in The Sopranos was embarrassing.

  But the funny thing is that after a while I discovered I didn’t have to tell anyone which role I played. All I had to do was wait for a while, and they’d come up with the answer themselves. The wrong answer.

  “Which part did you play in The Sopranos?” they’d say. “I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  “Well …” I’d say. Then I’d wait for them to take a guess.

  “No wait, I’ve got it! You were that guy Christopher killed in the butcher shop and chopped up into little pieces with the meat cleaver. I remember now! He said, ‘It’s gonna be a long time before I eat at Satriale’s again.’”

  To which I’d reply, “I’m a method actor, but I draw the line at turning myself into a slice of salami.”

  No matter which role they guessed, I had a clever answer for them. It made them laugh but would never confirm or deny if they were right.

  “Wait, I know!” they’d say. “You were the guy who died on the toilet. You died of a heart attack caused by constipation.”