The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  Jane Addams’s nephew introduced Scala to the idea of city planning. She enrolled in continuing-education classes at the University of Chicago and began working with the Near West Side Planning Board. The neighborhood remained a pocket of urban blight, but Scala was hopeful that newly targeted urban renewal money from the federal government could transform the area.

  These aspirations came to an abrupt halt in 1961 when Daley announced his decision to tear down large parts of the neighborhood to house a campus of the University of Illinois. Daley doomed a beloved Catholic church and Hull House to the wrecking ball, along with eight hundred houses and two hundred businesses. Scala led the opposition to the mayor’s heavy-handed plan, organizing, picketing, and occupying City Hall with fellow Italian-American women during a two-hundred-person sit-in composed mostly of mothers trying to protect their family homes and shouting furiously that the rich always take away from the poor. After someone mysteriously bombed Scala’s home with dynamite, she and her husband Charles moved into an apartment at Hull House.

  Scala took the case against Mayor Daley to the Supreme Court but lost—a decision that condemned one of Chicago’s oldest ethnic enclaves. Her sole success was preserving the original Hull House building. The family home at 1030 West Taylor Street had never been slotted for demolition—her advocacy had always been on behalf of the neighborhood—and she and Charles moved back, remaining there for the rest of their lives.

  Florence Scala (left), picketing to save her Italian-American neighborhood from Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley’s wrecking ball.

  In 1964, still fresh from the wounds of the destruction, Scala ran for First Ward alderman, declaring that she was determined to “mark the beginning of the end for the hoodlums who have dominated the ward since the beginning of this century.” Despite support from young people and independents, she was badly defeated. Florence Scala, who died in 2007, has been described as a “Rosa Parks of the Italian-American neighborhood.” Studs Terkel called her “my heroine,” who “tried with intelligence and courage to save the soul of our city. She represented to me all that Chicago could have been.”

  Marlon Brando’s romanticized Mafia don in The Godfather was not a ruthless thug but a judicious leader of a criminal enterprise.

  A crime fiction writer was gathering material, poring over thousands of pages of the Kefauver report and absorbing the ready-made pulp fiction of Joe Valachi’s words. Mario Puzo understood that a nation avidly tuned in to the testimony of street thugs and turncoats would devour a sweeping gangster story. His two earlier works of fiction had received some minor critical acclaim—no doubt a major achievement for a man born in 1920 to illiterate southern Italian peasants—but pride wasn’t putting food on the family table for this husband with five children. The Dark Arena and The Fortunate Pilgrim had produced only $6,500 in royalties. His next novel would earn him over $6 million.

  “I was forty-five years old and tired of being an artist. Besides, I owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks and assorted bookmakers and shylocks,” Puzo explained about his decision to write The Godfather. He had never met “an honest-to-god” gangster; even his lifelong love of gambling connected him merely with local bookies. Instead, he drew on memories of tough guys from the streets of his Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood and wove tales from government testimony. “You can write and get transcripts of all their investigative committees,” Puzo explained. “For ten bucks, I got one hundred volumes.”

  Puzo’s easy lifting and embellishment of real-life anecdotes gave his fiction a verisimilitude that the public accepted as fact. The writer also recognized that the necessary alchemy to transform nonfiction into a successful novel depended not just on the unassailable lure of crime, sex, and violence, but on the reader’s sympathy with the story’s protagonist. In Puzo’s hands, a Mafia don was not a ruthless thug, but a tough yet judicious leader of a criminal enterprise that existed in parallel with a similarly corrupt and hypocritical civic government.

  Mario Puzo quipped that he wrote The Godfather because he was “tired of being an artist” and in debt.

  The public first turned the pages of The Godfather in 1969 as a deeply divided country debated the Vietnam War and the limits of authority. For many Americans, government had become the villain. Puzo found the perfect moment to publish a novel whose protagonist, Don Corleone, offered a family-centered (albeit murderous) model of governance ready to exact justice.

  Though The Godfather sold millions of copies, its everlasting place in American popular culture didn’t gain its footing until after the 1972 release of the movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola and written by Coppola and Puzo. Coppola’s lavishly re-created scenes of first- and second-generation Italian life in America brought these images to the screen, accompanied by a lush musical score from the Italian composer Nino Rota. Coppola followed this cinematic achievement two years later with The Godfather: Part II; after a hiatus, Coppola released his long-awaited third and final installment in 1990.

  The movies tapped into nostalgia for the immigrant past, using period details to reenact the spectacle of an Italian-American wedding or the terror and loneliness of the Ellis Island journey. Italian Americans either embraced the Godfather movies as great filmmaking or rejected them as perpetuating damaging stereotypes.

  Ironically, Puzo’s novel was published a year before the federal government implemented the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a statute that, by the 1980s, would significantly crush the power of organized crime. RICO enabled the government to bring groups, rather than single individuals, to trial by presenting a pattern of racketeering. If The Godfather cynically implied that organized crime was an inescapable part of a corrupt society, the RICO statute showed how law enforcement, while never obliterating these groups, could make serious inroads in stanching the activity of Italian-American organized crime and the subsequent infiltration of Chinese and Russian mobsters.

  Director Francis Ford Coppola on the set of The Godfather. The popularity of the trilogy cemented the myth of the Mafia in the minds of Americans.

  Despite this significant decline in the power and reach of the mob, the Godfather trilogy perpetuated the myth of a tightly controlled, impenetrable network of criminal masterminds. Few other gangster films, with perhaps the exception of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, contained The Godfather’s cinematic breadth and skill. Scorsese’s film, based on the nonfiction book by Nicholas Pileggi, is decidedly unromantic, however, depicting the psychotic life of an Italian- and Irish-American mob turncoat named Henry Hill in all its ugliness.

  The Godfather trilogy made the genre ripe for parody as well, inspiring a string of comedies that included Married to the Mob, Bullets over Broadway, The Freshman, Mickey Blue Eyes, Analyze This, Analyze That, and even a husky-voiced mob shark played by Robert De Niro in the children’s film Shark Tale. This steady stream of fictional portrayals eventually influenced real-life criminals, who began to imitate their screen personae. Gambino family crime head John Gotti played The Godfather’s musical score at his notorious hangout, the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy; and federal prosecutors listening to electronic surveillance began noticing that mobsters were appropriating dialogue created by Coppola and Puzo.

  Yet by the dawn of the twenty-first century, most of the romance was gone from being a gangster. Unlike the aristocratic Corleones, mobsters like John Gotti dealt in drugs, invested in topless bars, and murdered indiscriminately. Breaking the code of Mafia silence (the omertà) became almost commonplace, allowing federal prosecutors to put street thugs and the five families’ heads alike in prison. Even John Gotti, nicknamed “Teflon Don” because of his ability to elude criminal convictions, spent his last days in prison, dying of cancer in 2002. His underboss Salvatore (“Sammy the Bull”) Gravano had turned state’s evidence against him.

  Fiction becomes fact: Gambino family crime head John Gotti played The Godfather’s musical score at his no
torious social club.

  By this time, Puzo’s descriptions of honor-bound families and criminal geniuses seemed close to comical. Vincent (“The Chin”) Gigante, a Gambino boss, roamed the streets of his neighborhood in a bathrobe and slippers, hoping the feds would believe he was insane (they didn’t). When federal agents went through John Gotti Jr.’s basement and found a typed list of the top-secret organization’s “made men,” the Daily News published the story under the headline “Dumbfella.”

  From this new landscape of dark humor, cold-blooded killings, and hapless thugs, David Chase created the landmark cable television series The Sopranos, transferring the idea of “men of honor” to a far grittier contemporary reality. In Tony Soprano, American audiences met a New Jersey mob boss with money worries, a nightmare of a mother, and ever-demanding family. He turned to an analyst and a prescription for Prozac.

  The show’s dark humor, continual references to the Godfather films, and willingness to journey through emotional and cultural terrain rarely before seen on television made The Sopranos, which ran from 1999 to 2007, a postmodern drama adored by critics. But it also outraged some Italian Americans who resent the roles cast for them long ago by popular culture’s easy identification of organized crime with Italian ethnicity.

  The Sopranos transferred the idea of “men of honor” to a far grittier contemporary reality.

  One fact is certain in the depiction of Italian Americans by Hollywood mythmakers: blockbuster ticket sales and high Nielsen ratings mean repeating a formula ad infinitum. After the success of The Godfather, Italian-American characters in movies and television have been portrayed by one of two predominant stereotypes: the don or the dimwit. Films like Saturday Night Fever, My Cousin Vinny, and Moonstruck, along with a cast of television characters, from Arthur Fonzarelli (“Fonzie”) on Happy Days to Joey Tribbiani on Friends, created the portrait of the dumb but sympathetic Italian American.

  With the decline of scripted television shows for the bargain production costs of reality TV, Italian Americans have been caricatured more than ever, defined by big hair or biceps, gaudy jewelry, and foul mouths on shows like Jersey Shore, Mob Wives, and The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Because it has become increasingly difficult to portray the nuanced ways in which ancestral roots shape the character of third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation hyphenated Americans, subtlety has bowed to the sledgehammer.

  John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. The film created a disco dance craze, but also fostered the stereotype of the dim-witted Italian American.

  Younger generations, far removed from the immigrant experience and more confident of their social status, may not be as bothered by these stereotypes as their parents or grandparents are. They can laugh at and ultimately sympathize with the “guido” character, and imitate lines from a film that came out decades before they were born. But for Italian Americans growing up after World War II and establishing themselves professionally when The Godfather first captured the imagination of the country, the stigma of the Mafia was very real, shadowing their accomplishments.

  Jersey Shore and Mob Wives. Because it has become increasingly difficult to portray the nuances of third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation ancestry, subtlety has bowed to the sledgehammer.

  I NOSTRI PAESANI

  David Chase

  David Chase is a writer, director, television producer, and creator of the acclaimed series The Sopranos. A multiple Emmy Award winner, Chase has among his other television credits The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure. Chase also wrote and directed the film Not Fade Away, an autobiographical coming-of-age story about aspiring teenage rock singers. Chase’s paternal grandparents came from the towns of Roccamonfina and Caserta in the province of Caserta, and his maternal grandparents, from Ariano Irpino in the province of Avellino, which served as the origin of his fictional Sopranos family.

  Q: You’ve described your family as not the happiest group of people.

  Chase: My immediate family—my mother, my father—while we had many happy moments and a lot of good times, there was a certain pall over the house. My mother was almost medieval in her thinking. She would say, “Don’t let the cat get near the baby, it will suck the breath away.” We had a relative who died at a very young age of a brain aneurysm. She was going to graduate school, and my mother said, “You see, David, she was too smart.” It was that kind of thinking.

  Q: Growing up, how aware were you of being Italian-American?

  Chase: I was very aware of it. My mother’s father and mother spoke only Italian, period. My grandfather always wore a black suit and tie, and we used to go there for Saturday night dinners. He was the only one who spoke. There would be fifteen people at the table, and only he would talk . . . One time we were having Thanksgiving dinner, and my grandfather took this peach and started crying because it reminded him of the peaches back in the Old Country.

  Q: Tony Soprano, the character you created, is very nostalgic. Is that part of you?

  Chase: Yeah, very much. I’m a nostalgic person. I try not to be, but I am.

  Q: Did you like growing up Italian?

  Chase: I’ve always felt lucky to be Italian. I think it is a nice thing to be. Probably as time goes on it is going to . . . kind of vanish.

  Q: Why did your family change its name?

  Chase: My grandmother came here at twelve and worked in the mills in Providence. She was illiterate. She married an older guy named DeCesare. She had three or four kids with him. Then, when she was in her early twenties, a boarder, a young man from Roccamonfina, moved into the house and they hooked up. She had two kids with that guy, but she told DeCesare they were his. One of those two kids was my father, so my father’s name was DeCesare. The new guy’s name was Joe Fusco. Anyway, things fell apart. She and Joe Fusco took all the kids, the DeCesare kids and the two Fusco kids, and ran away from Providence to Newark, New Jersey. They chose the name Chase because it sounded a little like DeCesare, but they wouldn’t be able to be tracked down in any of the Italian neighborhoods.

  Q: Do you ever think about changing it back?

  Chase: I’ve thought about it a couple of times, and when The Sopranos was coming on the air I thought I should go back to my Italian name. I talked it over with the people at HBO, and they said, “Don’t do that,” and I listened to them. They said, “You’re known as David Chase. Don’t do it now.” I knew it was going to create some problems with Italian-American antidefamation groups because I didn’t have an Italian name, but I didn’t change it back, and it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.

  Q: How aware were you of the Mafia when you were growing up? Were there “made” guys around?

  Chase: I didn’t know there was such a thing as a made guy until I was maybe a teenager, and I’m not even sure I knew that it was called a “made guy” then. I knew there were people in the neighborhood who were gangsters, as my parents called them.

  Q: Why do people love seeing gangster films?

  Chase: The director John Boorman, who made the Irish crime film The General, suggested that in a time of atomization of the family, the community, and the dissolution of old ideals, it is the last tribal thing we’ve got. It is really tribal—it is not your family, it is your tribe. That is a nurturing feeling for people.

  Q: Were you conscious of wanting to portray a real, not romanticized, family when you created The Sopranos?

  Chase: I wasn’t consciously trying to do anything. I wasn’t trying to do any kind of exposé. I wrote what I knew. I had a pretty good idea that a lot of it or some of it was funny. I was very particular that the humor was in the details. A lot of the dialogue in the first season of The Sopranos that comes out of the mother [Livia Soprano] is really just my mother talking.

  I NOSTRI PAESANI

  John Turturro

  The actor John Turturro has appeared in numerous films, including Do the Right Thing, Barton Fink, Quiz Show, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Turturro is also a writer and director, whose first film, Mac, ab
out three brothers working together in construction, won a Golden Camera award for best first feature at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. Turturro has written and directed several other films, including Passione, a documentary released in 2010 about the rich musical tradition of the city of Naples.

  Q: Where did you grow up?

  Turturro: I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Hollis Queens—the home of rap—and it was a very mixed neighborhood. We lived in a garden apartment. We all slept in the same room—my mother, my father, my brother, and me. I grew up in a black neighborhood until I was five or six, when we moved to Rosedale, which was more of an Italian, Irish, and somewhat Jewish neighborhood. It was very segregated at that time. I was considered very dark, and people kept calling me a Puerto Rican, and they called me a little black kid. I didn’t like that neighborhood as much as Hollis, I have to say.

  Q: In your work as a director and writer, you often focus on family. What is it about family that draws you in as an artist?

  Turturro: Well, when you don’t have opportunities to travel and go places, a lot of your life is defined within this one place—around the table with everybody pitching in. My father worked with his father, and he worked with his brothers. My mother also was part of his [masonry] business and she worked in the dressmaking business with her cousin. We shared holidays together and there was always a lot of family around.