I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

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  To my wife, Sandra,

  and my children, Rick, Danny III, Jaime, and Stacey, for getting me through the toughest times of my life; and to the memory of my mother, Frances, who represents the good in me.

  * * *

  My hope was that Paul Mazursky would write the foreword to this book. Sadly, he passed away during the writing, so I decided not to have one.

  Paul/ “Who loves you?”/Danny Aiello

  Chapter One

  Searching for Me

  In March 1990, I was sitting in the audience at L.A.’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, waiting for the winners to be announced at the sixty-second Academy Awards ceremony. All around me were gorgeous women and handsome men. The Oscars were the kind of event that showed this New York City kid just how far he had come from his beginnings on the streets of the West Side of Manhattan and the South Bronx.

  My stomach was tied in knots. That year, I was nominated as Best Actor in a Supporting Role for my performance as Sal Frangione in Spike Lee’s controversial film Do the Right Thing.

  The nomination was so important to me. It told me, You’re not only a working actor, but you’ve been accepted by your peers. For a guy who never set foot in an acting class and who only started his career in his mid-thirties, this was a supreme validation.

  I recall clearly what else I felt that night, with all the glitter and glamour flowing around me like a river.

  No matter where I was, I was an outsider. Even with an Oscar nomination and everybody talking about my performance, I still had a nagging sense that somehow I didn’t belong.

  It’s a feeling that I’ve always had. At something like this major awards event, the sense of being an outsider was especially sharp. What am I doing here? I kept thinking. I wasn’t a member of the Hollywood inner circle. I grew up working-class, not privileged. I’m street. And here I was, surrounded by people who were more like avenues, landscaped boulevards, private drives.

  The thing about being an actor, though, is that you’re never alone. With me that evening were all the characters I had ever portrayed in the movies and on the stage. They whispered in my ear, telling me that while winning isn’t everything, losing doesn’t have a hell of a lot to say for itself. Those voices are always present.

  Throughout my life, I’ve always been searching for me. Creating characters is part of that search. At the Oscars that night, the truth was both simple and complicated.

  I only know who I am when I am somebody else.

  It sounds like a riddle, but it’s the reality of my life. When I’m playing a character, only then do I know who I am, only then am I complete.

  I’ve experienced dark times in my life when I’ve been an outsider even to myself. I’ve been so depressed and confused that I’ve experienced a loss of self. Acting helped save me.

  Geena Davis, who was presenting the Best Actor in a Supporting Role award that evening, stepped up to the podium onstage. She introduced all the contenders, my name among them. I was up against some heavy hitters: Marlon Brando, Denzel Washington, Martin Landau, and Dan Aykroyd.

  “The Academy Award for this year’s best supporting actor goes to . . .” She struggled opening up the envelope.

  The moment hung in the balance for me. In a lot of ways, it represented a culmination of the journey I was on, leading me to great heights and devastating lows, transporting me to places like the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles.

  I want to invite you, the reader, on this journey in search of self. It’s my hope that this personal journey of mine might help you on yours.

  Come on along.

  Chapter Two

  My Very Own West Side Story

  Memories of my childhood emerge from a warm, golden glow of family, especially the devotion of my dear mother, Frances Pietrocova Aiello.

  Mom was my rock. She made me the man I am today. My father, Daniel Aiello Sr., took a hike early on, before I was born. Throughout my childhood, he was absent more often than not. It was up to my mother to keep our family together. Her example taught me that the real heroes aren’t the ones who win gold medals or Nobel Prizes (or Academy Awards).

  As a kid, I never knew how poor we were because all my friends were from hard-luck families. I came into a world that was far away from the one we live in now. Some of this book was written by speaking to a virtual woman named Siri. I travel in a car that has a navigation system guided by a satellite that orbits sixteen thousand miles above the planet. If I have a factual question, the answer is immediate, at my fingertips.

  When I was born in June 1933, we weren’t in the modern age quite yet. The Aiellos still had one foot in the last century. That golden glow around my family that I remember from my childhood came from kerosene lamps. Electricity was dirt cheap, and Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulbs could have lit our rooms for nickels a week, but kerosene was cheaper than dirt.

  City planner Robert Moses and the rest of the bigwigs of New York City had called our West Side neighborhood “blighted.” Pretty soon they would come in with bulldozers and flatten it for redevelopment. When I look at a map of modern Manhattan, I can’t find the blocks where I grew up. They’ve been erased and built over.

  If you want to catch a glimpse of what my old neighborhood was like, just see the movie West Side Story. Director Robert Wise shot that film in the condemned city blocks that would become the site of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. As for me, I might as well have been born a Jet all the way, as the song goes. Those were my childhood haunts, right there on the big screen. Preserved in shot after shot of that classic movie were the streets and ramshackle tenements that thousands of families like mine called home.

  By the time West Side Story was released in 1961, almost everything depicted was already in the process of being destroyed. But for nearly a decade, from the time I was born until we moved to the Bronx, a small ten-block-square slice of Manhattan’s West Side was my childhood turf.

  An unofficial line existed in that area of Manhattan, separating the haves and the have-nots. In my neighborhood, the line was West End Avenue. Nowadays, the closer you get to the Hudson River, the higher the rent. It was the direct opposite back then. The Aiellos lived on the west side of West End Avenue. To the east of West End, the residents weren’t rich, but there was some money there—not much, but some. Farther east, past the dividing line of Broadway, there lay another land, a land of giants. That’s where the real money was.

  You would have thought our West Side neighborhood was something out of a Charles Dickens novel. In the 1930s, there were still horse-drawn carts traveling the streets. A stone trough for watering horses sat on the corner of Seventy-Second Street and Broadway, and an actual stable was on our block. Just to indicate the kind of transition period America was enjoying back then, the stable sold automobile tires, too.

  Merchants would travel down West End Avenue every day, hawking their wares with their wagons and mules. One actually called out, “Rags! We sell rags!” but why the hell anyone would want to buy a rag is a mystery to me that’s gotten lost in time.

  To give you another idea of the time and place: early every morning, the iceman cometh, straight out of the Eugene O’Neill play. If the iceman made a sale, he’d drape a burlap sack over his back and grab a suitcase-sized block of ice with a huge pa
ir of metal tongs. He’d sling the heavy block onto his back and trudge up the stairs to the customer’s apartment. The block would then slide right into a compartment in an old-fashioned icebox, not an electric refrigerator. After a day or two, the ice would melt and the whole process would start over again.

  My mother’s family, the Pietrocovas, came from the Naples and Sorrento areas of Italy. Both Mom and Dad were born in the United States. The West Side neighborhood where I grew up was home to many immigrant Italians. But I was as American as a kid could get.

  Home for me, baby “Junior” Aiello, was a basement railroad apartment on West Sixty-Eighth Street, just off West End Avenue. They called them railroad apartments because the rooms were laid out in a straight line. You could stand at one end of our place and look all the way through to the other side.

  There were four rooms for eight of us—me; my mother; my four sisters, Helen, Gloria, Rosebud, and Annabelle; my brother Joey; and my grandfather Raphael, who went by the Americanized name of “Ralph.” The toilet was in the hallway, and other tenants in the building had access to it, as well.

  Our apartment wasn’t wired for electricity. Instead of a shower, we had a tub in the kitchen area. Baths were a once-a-week occasion. Heat came from a wood-burning stove in the parlor. My mother cooked on a cast-iron stove. The smell of wood smoke and kerosene still sucks me right back into those early days of childhood.

  The amazing thing is that we preserved our privacy in that apartment. Never do I remember seeing any member of my family in a state of undress. In our home, “respect” was the most important word. If there was a closed door anywhere, you were to knock before entering. My mother didn’t preach this. Instead, she set the example by doing it every day.

  My father showed up at most a couple times a month. At my young age, I didn’t understand that a dad could be anything other than someone who dropped by every once in a while. All I heard were vague excuses for his absence. He was “traveling,” Mom said. I would see the man for a few hours one evening and then he would be gone, leaving behind a faint smell of cigar smoke in his wake. I didn’t know him well enough to miss him.

  As a kid I didn’t have much to do with my older siblings, either. I was the second youngest of the six surviving Aiello children. Helen, Gloria, and Rosebud were all leading their teenage lives, as was my older brother Joey. That left me spending a lot of time with my sister Annabelle.

  When the teenagers did bother to notice us, it often wasn’t pretty. I recall a memorable beating I took from my brother Joey. He would have been around twelve or thirteen at the time, while I was only seven or eight. Joey kept a pistol hidden in his clothes drawer. I found the handgun, took it to school, and promptly lost it. I can’t remember if it was confiscated by a teacher or by an older schoolmate. But I do remember Joey’s anger. He was much bigger than me. When he started to hit me, I had no other choice but to sit there and take it until he felt bad about doing it.

  Helen, as the oldest sister, acted as a second mother in the family. She worked, earned money for the family, and had a boyfriend. The only resentment I felt around home about my absentee father came not from Mom but from Helen. She and my father didn’t get along at all. She was old enough to have spent time with him as a child and old enough to grasp the enormity of his deserting us.

  * * *

  Back in those days of the 1930s, old-fashioned traditions held on. My family and most of those around us didn’t use funeral homes. We dressed our dead by ourselves. This practice left me with one of my enduring memories of childhood, the night I slept with an open casket. My grandmother on my mother’s side passed away, and her wake was held right there in our apartment. There was Grandmother that night, resting in peace in her coffin, and there was I, little five-year-old Junior Aiello, trying to sleep only a few feet away.

  My childhood was death-haunted in another way, too. A mystery hung in the air when I was growing up, one that still plagues me to this day. My mother and father had seven children together, four girls and three boys. One of those boys, Ralphie, who was named after my grandfather Raphael, died as an infant before I was born.

  Old memories float up whenever I think about my brother’s death. He was like a phantom that haunted my youth. I would bother my mother about him. What was he like? How did he die? Would I see him in heaven?

  “When he fell sick, the doctors told me it would be bad for him to drink water,” Mom recalled, sadness in her eyes from the memory. “I would take a wet cloth and dab his lips, but that’s all I could do. ‘Wa-wa,’ Ralphie kept saying. He was begging for water, but I couldn’t let him drink any.”

  Wa-wa. Wa-wa. Whenever she told me the story, both of us would wind up in tears.

  I’ve searched through birth records and hospital documents since then. The death certificate I obtained states that Ralph Aiello passed away on August 3, 1932, at Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island in the Bronx.

  Family legend had it that Ralphie was first buried in a potter’s field on Hart Island. Later, supposedly a Catholic charity linked to the St. Patrick’s diocese paid to exhume the little body and have it formally placed in a proper grave. The burial records claim he was interred in Calvary Cemetery in Queens. But I honestly believe that it never happened. I think Ralphie still rests in that potter’s field.

  There’s nothing I can say that conclusively proves this. There are only inferences I make from what my mother told me. I have the text of a letter from Calvary Cemetery:

  Please be advised that Ralph Aiello was interred in section 39 on August 6th, 1932 at the age of 7 months. Ralph Aiello was interred in an untitled grave. This grave holding is for indigent burials only. There are no markers allowed on this grave holding.

  North Brother Island, where my brother died, is sometimes identified in city records as a “leper colony.” That meant it was a place of quarantine. In those days before antibiotics, contagious diseases were much feared. My brother’s death certificate listed an infectious disease, pertussis, as the cause of death. Whooping cough.

  Mary Mallon, the notorious cook known better as Typhoid Mary, was quarantined on North Brother Island during the time my brother was in the hospital there. Because she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever bacteria, Typhoid Mary caused the deaths of dozens of people for whom she prepared meals.

  My brother was born days before Christmas in 1931. When he was just seven months and fourteen days old, he fell sick. On Friday, July 29, 1932, city health authorities transported the feverish baby to North Brother Island. By the following Wednesday, Ralphie Aiello was dead.

  My mother often told me of a close call she had in her life. “I was going to visit your brother Ralphie,” she said. “I was waiting at the dock, but your father was late to come, so I didn’t go on the boat.”

  The ferry, a steamer called Observation, exploded and sank in the East River. Seventy-two people were killed in the disaster. It happened at a little past eight o’clock on the morning of September 9, 1932—five weeks after my brother passed away. Mom must have intended to take the ferry in order to visit his grave in the potter’s field. If that’s the case, then the reinterment of my brother’s remains on August 6, 1932, doesn’t make sense.

  The family story was that the Catholic charities placed my brother’s body in a cemetery plot. No one had the money back then for individual grave plots. Did a St. Patrick’s charity pay to reinter him? The story could have all been just a comforting tale to make everyone feel better.

  Ralphie was blood to me. I am a part of this boy. In the scheme of things, his death and burial might be just a minor mystery, important only to the family. If I can ever locate his remains to a certainty, I want to give Ralphie a proper headstone. It’s the least I can do to honor the brother I never knew.

  * * *

  My West Side neighborhood might have been a constant, but as a family we moved a lot, both before and after I was born. There were two moves during my first ten years, once out of that first
basement railroad apartment to the fourth floor of a tenement, then back into another basement. All three places were on the same block of West Sixty-Eighth Street. The reason was always the same, too: a lack of rent money. We needed to start over with a new landlord.

  This wasn’t a rare practice on the West Side of Manhattan. A lot of families did the same thing. The building superintendents were making a small fortune off the constant upheaval in the neighborhood. They would earn a payment by turning the lodgings over. When the Aiellos moved out, the next day someone else would move in. The new tenants had to pay a fee to the super in order to take possession. The landlords might not even have known about the constant turnover. It was musical chairs, only with apartments.

  In those days the family dog, Bessie—a big blond collie—served as my constant companion. She ate what we did, namely our table scraps—we didn’t know from dog food back then. I was a scrawny kid, able to take occasional rides on the dog’s back. My mother sent me and Bessie out together to pick up items at the local grocery. I’d let her carry the bag on the way back home. Bessie was such a good dog that she would never run off with the groceries to make a meal for herself.

  Given that we never had much money, the Aiello kids existed on a steady diet of peanut butter sandwiches, which we loved. When we could get bananas, we’d add slices to the sandwiches. Another staple was potato-and-egg sandwiches. And oatmeal, which I hated, but my mother fed it to us until it came out of our ears. We also ate the traditional peasant foods of my mother’s Italian heritage: beans, lentils, and pastafazool (pasta and beans).

  Meat was a rarity in our household. At most, it was a once-a-week thing. Sunday dinner meant a special meal of wonderful freshly made spaghetti and meatballs. We dined without wine—we were the only Italian-American family in the universe that didn’t have it on the table during dinner. The reason might have been that we couldn’t afford it, but the lasting effect was that not one member of my family ever became a big drinker.