I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  “Let’s call him Chief Aiello,” I said. I thought, What the fuck, no one knows me from Adam, I might as well use my own name.

  While I was in Italy filming scenes with Sergio, I noticed a young actor in the cast who looked familiar to me. His name was James Hayden. I recalled that while I was doing Knockout on Broadway, Jimmy would stop by and watch me working out with the heavy bag onstage at the Helen Hayes Theatre. Back then, he had been pretty green, just a great-looking kid studying to become an actor.

  That had been three years earlier, and now he was cast as Patsy Goldberg, one of the young lead roles in Sergio’s film. I didn’t see him much while on set. We didn’t have any scenes together but connected briefly over the days when he visited me during my run in Knockout. I liked what I saw of his work, and it appeared he had a great future ahead of him.

  But Jimmy’s story turned tragic. Frankie Gio, a friend of mine from New York, played a heavy in the movie and told me he had to slap the shit out of some kid in the film because the guy was constantly stoned and causing problems on the set. As I listened to Frankie, I realized he was talking about none other than the boy wonder, James Hayden.

  Frankie was the wrong guy to get tough with. He was a professional boxer who could hit like a sonofabitch. Frankie also told me that while he was in the process of “correcting” Jimmy’s degenerate behavior, the star of the film yelled out some advice.

  “Don’t hit him in the face,” Robert De Niro said. “We’ve got a scene to do, so don’t hit him in the face.” Frankie hit him everywhere else.

  I never saw Jimmy Hayden again after Italy, not alive, anyway. Sitting home watching television one night in 1983, I saw him being carried out of a New York apartment building in a body bag. Heroin overdose.

  I heard later that he had gotten a standing ovation on Broadway that same evening, playing opposite his good friend and mentor Al Pacino in David Mamet’s play American Buffalo. He died only a couple weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday. When I met Jimmy on the set of Knockout, he was so full of enthusiasm, so eager and brimming with the need for knowledge. What a fucking waste.

  After Once Upon a Time in America wrapped, Sergio invited me to go to the Cannes film festival with the stars of the film. I felt somewhat embarrassed, because I didn’t think my limited role warranted an appearance.

  “It’s such a small part,” I kept saying.

  “Danny,” he’d reply, “you are going to be one of the stars in my next film!”

  Just hearing him say that gave me a great feeling. His next movie was to be one he’d work on for the last ten years of his life: The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, about the World War II battle in Russia. Unfortunately, he never lived to finish the project. I’m a little sad that Sergio Leone is known today in the U.S. primarily for his spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood. Not because those films aren’t great, but because as a filmmaker he was so much more than that.

  The trip to Cannes with Robert De Niro and Sergio worked out better than I could have expected. I’ll never forget my experience at the Hotel du Cap in Antibes. The joint cost $25,000 a night, cash. The management didn’t take credit cards. It’s a good thing I wasn’t paying. The film company was.

  I checked in, exhausted from the trip. I came over on the Concorde, which was the only way I could handle cross-Atlantic travel. Jet lag had me still asleep in late morning of the following day.

  I woke to a blast of horns in the hotel driveway down below. The room was like a palace, with big French windows opening onto the sea. I stumbled out of bed, still feeling the rush from the plane going so fast. Wearing a ripped T-shirt like Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, I opened the shutters.

  There below me stretched the Mediterranean, there were the Riviera beaches, there were the long tree-lined roads going down to the water. And there also were Bobby De Niro and Sergio Leone, honking the car horn to wake me up.

  I started yelling out the window like I was in the fucking Bronx. “Bobby! Hey, Bobby,” I shouted out. “You got the spaghetti ready?” I was in a fog and didn’t know what the fuck I was saying.

  “What’re you doin’?” Sergio yelled up, shaking his head and laughing.

  Bobby said later, “You looked like Brando yelling out the window.”

  That trip to Cannes was when Bobby first told me, “Nobody says ‘fuck’ like you. From your lips, the word sounds like a song.”

  Now there’s a compliment I will take to the grave.

  * * *

  In the mid-1980s, the buzz around Woody Allen focused on a film project of his, about performers clinging to the lower rungs of the New York show business ladder. The kinds of actors and comics featured in Broadway Danny Rose were not superstars and not particularly successful. Their most obvious characteristic was that they kept at it, year after year, show after show.

  The title character was a talent manager, and Woody cast himself in the part. The action revolved around a performer whom Danny Rose represented, Lou Canova, a saloon singer who’d once had fifteen minutes of fame but was now just another lounge act.

  I had been singing all my life. Not professionally, but whenever I felt the spirit move me. In Broadway Danny Rose, the role of Lou Canova called for a singer, someone who was professional but not too professional.

  “Danny, you’re my ace in the hole,” Woody Allen said to me when we entered into casting discussions for the film. I took that comment as a positive.

  What followed afterward had me feeling even more optimistic. Bobby Greenhut, the producer, and Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, kept talking me up for the role. I don’t necessarily believe it was because they thought I was great, but they had both worked with me before on my aborted scene in Annie Hall.

  I never saw the script for Broadway Danny Rose. Woody didn’t give out script pages, only roles. He never once came close to promising me the part. Nevertheless, I cannot tell you how excited I was over the prospect of playing Lou Canova. While he didn’t normally audition actors, for the singing role Woody had to hear what I could do. I sang my old Improv standby for him, “Some of These Days.”

  Broadway Danny Rose was to begin shooting in two weeks, and I waited for the call. And waited. And waited.

  As things turned out, Woody gave the Lou Canova role to a singer named Nick Apollo Forte. The news was delivered via Brian Hamill, the brother of journalist Pete Hamill and a celebrated still photographer on numerous films, including Woody’s.

  I was devastated, heartbroken. I would have died for that part. I felt so close that I could taste it, and then suddenly it was gone. A few weeks passed by and Woody asked Brian Hamill how I was doing.

  “Well, he’s very disappointed,” Brian said.

  “Why?” Woody asked.

  “Because he didn’t get the part,” Brian said, stating the obvious.

  “Are you kidding? Danny works all the time!” Woody replied.

  He then told Brian that he had given the role to Nick Apollo Forte because the guy wrote his own music. Forte would go on to compose the song “Agita” for the film. Woody felt that Nick was Lou Canova.

  Even to this day, the website IMDb lists Broadway Danny Rose as among my movies, citing me as an “uncredited” member of the cast. I have no idea how this confusion arose, and I don’t much care. The part of Lou Canova goes into the catalog of my performances that never were.

  The whole episode became more troubling because, contrary to what Woody Allen thought, I didn’t work all the time. My financial affairs got so difficult that we almost sold the dream home we had purchased only a few years before. I owed $60,000 on it, but the potential profits from a sale would total $40,000—I would still be in the hole and no longer have a place to live.

  And right then, like a blessing, I got an offer for an action movie that ended up turning our financial prospects completely around. It was called The Protector, and I’d be costarring with Jackie Chan.

  * * *

  The call that saved me from losing my ho
me came from producer Tom Gray, who was putting the Jackie Chan project together. I agreed to do the movie for a fee that would pay off my bills and have a little something left over. That was the upside. The downside was that The Protector would be filming in Hong Kong. I hate flying so much that I would have rather dog-paddled to China, but I had no choice.

  Sandy accompanied me on the trip. I was wide awake the entire plane ride, as I never take pills of any kind. After a grueling nineteen-hour flight, the approach into the tight confines of Hong Kong resembled landing upon a postage stamp. The pilot must have been trained in aircraft carrier landings, but it was white-knuckle time for me.

  When I met Jackie, I liked him right away. Even though I didn’t know a word of Chinese, and he didn’t speak or understand much English, somehow we were able to communicate. He knew of my work and he was the one who had chosen me for the part.

  I had gotten to know much more about movie stunts since my son Danny III had become a professional. Danny III had hard-and-fast principles about risk on the job and always made a little speech to his crew at the beginning of every project: We are not daredevils. We are not kamikazes. We are stuntmen and -women. Safe is what we always plan to be.

  But during the Hong Kong shoot, I soon realized that things were different in China. If what Jackie Chan and his stuntmen do in movies looks real, it’s often because it is real. If a telephone is to be smashed into an actor’s face, sometimes it will be a real telephone, not a stunt prop designed to break apart on impact.

  A stuntman might be injured as a result of all this hard-knock realism, but Jackie and his crew seemed to shrug it off. There were dozens of other stunt people lined up and on call, all of whom were ready, willing, and waiting to break bones. First in line was the star himself, Jackie Chan, who was well-known for doing his own stunts.

  We were doing a scene one afternoon on the Hong Kong waterfront. Jackie was poised two hundred feet above me, fighting with a stuntman. They were kickboxing and pelting the hell out of each other with any object at hand, all while balancing themselves on a twenty-foot-square wooden platform. From down below, the action looked crazily fast and realistic.

  Afterward, as they descended back down to earth, I realized that Jackie had not been hooked up to a safety harness. Such a rig would have rendered the stunt much safer, even though it would still have been frightening enough to watch. I spoke to Jackie in his trailer, communicating through his interpreter.

  “You can kill yourself like that,” I said.

  Jackie answered me in broken English. “I can’t do it, Danny. My fans expect more from me.”

  “Fuck your fans,” I replied. I was speaking to Jackie, but I was thinking about the dangers that my own son faced every day on the job.

  * * *

  I’ve always tried to connect my acting to my street upbringing. I employed the same instincts on the stages of Broadway and in film that I used growing up in the Bronx.

  But instinct could carry me only so far. When I became familiar with the feel of the stage and the movie set, that’s when professionalism and experience started to kick in. By doing it over and over, I came to feel almost as if I were truly a classically trained actor. Macbeth lay within my grasp, Stanley Kowalski, certainly Willy Loman.

  “Without doing anything, Danny, you’re almost there at one hundred percent,” Woody Allen once said to me. He also told the New York Times that I was “simply a natural.”

  But I nursed a secret grudge against comments like this. Even though it was looking a gift horse in the mouth, I resented being praised as a natural actor, which seemed to be code for “untrained.” It implied that I didn’t have to put in the hard work I knew acting required. It’s like a sports commentator praising someone’s “natural” athleticism. Meanwhile, the athlete is out there busting his balls every day trying to perfect his game.

  Right after I completed my time on The Protector, Woody Allen called, offering me a role in his new movie, The Purple Rose of Cairo.

  Michael Keaton had signed on to play the double role of actor Gil Shepherd and his movie-within-the-movie character, Tom Baxter, who’s Mia Farrow’s love interest in the film. One evening, while I was in Café Central on Amsterdam Avenue, my favorite hangout at the time, a visibly upset Keaton walked in.

  “What’s wrong, Mike?” I asked.

  “He fired me!”

  “Who?” The kid was a mess.

  “Woody. He fired me.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess he thought I wasn’t funny enough.”

  Keaton was absolutely torn apart. I looked at him and saw my own experience in Broadway Danny Rose. The next day, Woody hired Jeff Daniels for the part. Because of the way Woody doles out only limited pages of his scripts, Jeff thought he was coming in to read for a small part. He only learned later, after being hired, that he had been given the lead.

  On the set of Purple Rose, Woody and I would put on the gloves and box for fun. During downtime, we often tossed a softball back and forth. He was a very good athlete, a good actor, and a wonderful writer-director.

  “Do it the way you feel comfortable,” was one of Woody Allen’s favorite phrases on the set. I interpreted that piece of direction as something of a test, as if he were telling me that I wasn’t a good enough actor to do the words as written. Therefore, I should feel free to change his words to suit myself.

  Fuck that, I thought. I would give Woody every line, every word, every letter precisely the way he wrote it. I have the capability to improvise my ass off. But Woody challenged me and I did the lines as is. Ironically, critics would respond to my performance in this film by saying it sounded as though I were improvising.

  Around that time, I had developed the habit of warning people off from living inside their heads too much. “Don’t be too analytical,” I would tell my son Ricky about his own acting career. “You’ll never be able to make a decision. And when you finally do, you’re never going to be able to be happy with it.”

  Acting can be very, very easy if you allow it to be. You don’t have to suffer for your art. You can just let it happen, whether you’re classically trained or not. For me, I always had to make an emotional connection in a role, or else there was nothing.

  Woody was always the ultimate minimalist as a director. He’d give you simple notes. “Be a little less angry.” “Be just a little happier.” That kind of stuff. With Woody, I felt myself falling into the same overanalytical trap I had been warning other people about.

  Beyond the lines he wrote, I believed in my heart that I could give him something more, and I was never satisfied with my scenes. He’d praise me and I would say to myself, He loves that? Really? What the fuck is he talking about? I just came on the set and did it. How the fuck could it be right?

  So I embarked upon a search for the “something more” that I felt I could give. We’d do the scene over again and again. Eventually, I’d wind up back with what I had done in the beginning.

  This phenomenon was evident in the scene where my character Monk pitches pennies with his pals as his wife walks by. We did multiple takes, but the first one was the best. I embody the classic boorish husband, too busy with his meaningless pastimes to show his woman respect.

  My character in Purple Rose is a bully. But like all bullies, he’s also a pussy. I wanted to find the vulnerability lurking underneath the nastiness. There is a specific passage in The Purple Rose of Cairo that demonstrated this personality trait.

  We called it the “Get me my meatloaf!” scene, after one of my lines. My character, the abusive husband, Monk, is with his wife, Cecilia, in their apartment. Cecilia is played in a cowering, mousey style by Mia Farrow. The scene is written in a spectacular manner. There is almost unbearable tension. The audience waits for this big, hulking bully—that would be me—to unload on his vulnerable missus.

  Mia and I did a first take. It felt good. The action moves through the shabby rooms of Monk and Cecilia’s Depression-era apartment, and the camera f
ollows along. The energy was fantastic.

  Woody watched the dailies and came back to Mia and me. “We’re going to reshoot the scene,” he said.

  The consensus of Woody’s inner circle, the half dozen people who watched dailies with him, was that the action had a grittiness and realism that reminded everyone of A Streetcar Named Desire. Normally, that would be a high compliment, but not this time. Woody finally decided the scene as shot didn’t have the lightness of Purple Rose. It was too real, and therefore not funny.

  The reshoot of the “Get me my meatloaf!” scene, the one that made it into the final film, did turn out to be lighter in mood. Mia and I still move through the apartment, talking back and forth. It works. It cooks. But I still believe we were much better the first time around.

  * * *

  In 1985, my friend Sean Penn married Madonna, the biggest pop star of the day. I had met Sean in New York in the early 1980s, during my hangout days at the Columbus Café. His new bride was of course world famous, but somehow her notoriety hadn’t caught up to me.

  “Hey, my wife is shooting a video and I think you’d be perfect to play a role in it,” Sean said to me in early 1986, reaching out by phone.

  My agent had already fielded a request for the project and had turned it down. Madonna’s videos were elaborate dance numbers or mini-dramas that played out against the soundtrack of her songs. I had never seen a single one. I put Sean off, saying that I would think about it, which in Hollywood circles is a polite way of rejecting something.

  I mentioned Sean’s offer to Sandy.

  “Sean Penn called me and said I should do a music video with the singer he just married,” I said. “You know, the one who calls herself Madonna?”

  My daughter Stacey happened to be in the room at the time. She immediately got excited. “Daddy, don’t you know her? You’ve got to do it!”