I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  “I don’t know, honey,” I replied.

  “Oh, please, please—just for me!”

  At Stacey’s urging, I got back to Sean, saying I would be happy to be in the video. A short time later I found myself playing Madonna’s father in “Papa Don’t Preach.” It was the first time a recognized movie actor would appear in a music video, something that became more common later. The scenes were shot in Staten Island, including on the ferry.

  I found Madonna to be tremendously driven and professional almost to a fault. She had done herself up to look like the actress Jean Seberg and wore a T-shirt that read “Italians Do It Better.”

  As I had promised my daughter, I brought Stacey along to the set. She was sixteen years old, still a little shy and wholly naive about the ways of show business. I arranged to have an assistant assigned to take care of her while I was busy doing my job. This assistant approached Madonna and requested a photo be taken with her and Stacey.

  The star was deeply preoccupied with the production of her video, and the assistant was told she would have to ask again later. But when that time came, my daughter politely begged off, saying she didn’t want a photo after all. This represented Stacey’s first on-set lesson in the whims of show business.

  Throughout the daylong shoot, I had a bad attitude about doing a video. I didn’t want to be there to begin with. The star and I exchanged only a few words over the single day we were on set together. I spoke more with James Foley, the director, who had worked with Madonna on the cult hit film Who’s That Girl.

  During our time together on set, I didn’t see Madonna as a music star or a tabloid gossip queen. We were shooting a drama, so I viewed both of us through our characters. She was my daughter. I was her father.

  At that point in her career, Madonna was not the Wonder Woman hard-body that she later became. She still had baby fat, with a softer, more rounded physique than she has now. The scene required me to take her in my arms in a fatherly embrace, her face to my chest. When it came time, I was deep into my character, so I really wasn’t hugging Madonna. I was a father hugging my daughter. The shot of the two of us together represented the emotional payoff for the whole video.

  When “Papa Don’t Preach” came out, it landed right in the middle of the abortion debate. It was a controversial song to begin with, and in the music video, my character turns his back on his own daughter, ashamed because she’s conceived a baby out of wedlock. I hadn’t signed on for any sort of political statement. I accepted the role only as a favor to Sean and because my daughter was a Madonna fan.

  “Papa Don’t Preach” won Best Female Video honors at the MTV Video Music Awards, which played it in heavy rotation. You could hardly turn on the television without seeing me and the most popular singer in the world acting out our father-and-daughter drama.

  For a quick job I didn’t really think twice about though, “Papa Don’t Preach” had enormous consequences for my career. Before I appeared in it, not many people under thirty years of age knew who the hell I was. Afterward, I suddenly had legions of young fans. I saw the effects of my newfound popularity every time I went out in public. My demographic began to skew much younger, as the Hollywood bean counters might say.

  But the story told in the video began to bother me. I thought Madonna had presented only one side of the equation. I was the father of a teenage daughter myself. I tried to imagine what would happen in my own family if Stacey informed me that she was pregnant and unmarried.

  Drama needs tension. James Foley, the director of “Papa Don’t Preach,” emphasized the conflict between father and daughter. I didn’t think the brief reconciliation at the end of the video was enough. It felt tacked on. What you truly remember is the father and daughter being at odds.

  So I conceived the idea of doing an answer song to “Papa Don’t Preach,” feeling that there was more to be said on the subject. Something was missing in the picture that Madonna had painted in her song and in the video: communication. The father-daughter relationship had to be a two-way street.

  The result was a song and music video, a personal project that was never intended for wide distribution, called “Papa Wants the Best for You.” The lyrics were written by my buddy Arthur Schroeck, who also had a daughter in her early teens, as did the producer, Ivan Bloch. In the video, I sing the lyrics and play a father searching for his wayward daughter. Sandy made a brief appearance as my character’s late wife. The action ended on a conciliatory note, with my daughter’s arm reaching out for me.

  The whole impulse behind “Papa Wants the Best for You” was heartfelt in the extreme. In life, I couldn’t stand the idea of alienation growing between me and my daughter, Stacey.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Moonstruck

  In the late fall of 1986, I was called to the New York City office of Norman Jewison, the Canadian director famous for such classics as In the Heat of the Night and Fiddler on the Roof. Norman had indicated he might have a role for me in his new movie. He was also a well-regarded director for the stage, so I knew I’d be at ease working with him.

  Our meeting turned into a two-man mutual admiration society, except I had a lot more to admire in his work. Norman told me he had a great screenplay written by the dramatist John Patrick Shanley. “He’s calling it Moonstruck. When I first read the script, I knew that you were Johnny Cammareri.”

  I was over the moon, so to speak. Norman Jewison made the kind of quality movies that I respected, and a lot of other actors felt the same way. Cher topped the Moonstruck cast, which was filled out with Nicolas Cage, Olympia Dukakis, and my old pal Vincent Gardenia.

  “I was thinking we could all get together and read the script,” Norman said.

  That stopped me cold. I took this as meaning that he wanted me to audition. At that stage in my career, I swore that I was through with reading for parts. The simple truth is that I didn’t audition because I couldn’t stand rejection. But I also believed that auditions weren’t really necessary for the casting process.

  Let’s say I’m the director and you’re coming in as an actor. An informal conversation tells me more than any audition. We casually sit together, talking about our lives. On that basis alone, I should be able to make a decision about whether I want you in my movie.

  Woody Allen, for example, never has you read, though he will call you in to sing if the part requires it. When Woody comes to the initial interview, he already knows what you’ve done and is prepared to give you the role. So it always baffles me why directors and producers would have you read for a part.

  I sometimes think that some directors are secretly looking for interpretations. They don’t yet know how they’re going to approach a character. They use auditions as a kind of fishing expedition, even videotaping the result. Auditioning actors are putting their own creative spin on a character, and some directors merely lift those character interpretations from the audition videos they’ve made.

  “Mr. Jewison, are you asking me to read?” I said. If he had responded with a yes, I would have thanked him politely and walked out on one of the cornerstone parts of my acting career.

  “Oh, no, no,” Norman said hurriedly, much to my relief. “You’ve got the job. I just want us all to read the film.”

  A week or so later, he and I walked down Broadway together. I get recognized fairly often, but for some reason on this day, fans were coming out of the woodwork. I must have been stopped a dozen times within the space of a few blocks. It was as if I had planned it. After the fan interactions kept happening, Norman began looking at me with an amused expression on his face.

  “Danny,” he said, “I’m glad I negotiated your salary before walking down these streets with you.”

  Norman approached Moonstruck as if it were a stage play, which was well within my comfort zone. Since this was my first full-blown film comedy (as opposed to something like The Purple Rose of Cairo, which I saw more as a tragicomedy), I worried about whether I could furnish the laughs. But I knew I was in
good hands with Norman.

  We rehearsed quite a bit, running through a number of scenes in the script, and ended up becoming more like a theater group than a movie cast. Even Cher and Nicky Cage, who weren’t known for their stage experience, joined in on the feeling of being one big happy theatrical family.

  It was good to reunite with Vincent Gardenia. He and I behaved like the longtime friends we were, constantly ribbing each other. He always cracked me up. For example, I noticed that whenever Vinny cooked macaroni on the set, he refused to salt it.

  “Vinny, how can you make pasta without salt?” I demanded. I thought it tasted like cardboard. He gave me his trademark deadpan look. When you’ve been deadpanned by Vinny Gardenia, you’ve been deadpanned by the best. I couldn’t help it—I broke out laughing. Not salting his pasta was just one more of this lovely man’s peculiarities. He avoided elevators and hated to fly even more than I did. Trains were his preferred method of travel.

  On the opposite end of the age spectrum, Nicky Cage and I got along well, too. He was still in his early twenties when he was cast in Moonstruck. Cher lobbied Norman hard for Nicky to get the part of Ronny, my character’s brother. In the end, it was her insistence that tipped the balance.

  I remember well an act of kindness that Nicolas Cage extended to me and my family while we were in New York shooting the film. My oldest son, Rick, worked at a Varick Street club called Heartbreak, one of the most popular dance venues of the day. On one of his nights off, he was at the club and enjoying himself perhaps a little too much. I got a call that my son had collapsed and passed out.

  Nicky heard of my troubles and vaulted into action. He didn’t question and didn’t hesitate but helped me mount a rescue mission. The two of us drove to Heartbreak. Wanting to shield Rick from the public eye, the club personnel offered a back way out.

  “I don’t want to hide him,” I said.

  “Let’s bring him out the front,” Nicky said.

  With me and Nicky on either side of him, one arm each, holding Rick upright, we managed to exit Heartbreak gracefully. My costar was charmingly good-natured about the whole incident and brushed off my effusive thanks for his help.

  The exteriors for Moonstruck were shot around the snowy streets of New York, but for the interiors, we transferred up to Norman’s hometown of Toronto. There we were treated very well. Norman often invited the cast to his home for elaborate, festive dinners. He was like the Maple Syrup King of Canada, with every cast member going home with jars of syrup cooked from sap drawn from his own sugar maple trees.

  Norman’s directing was influenced not only by his stage work but by the opera. Before shooting a scene in Canada, he took the entire cast to see La Bohème, the Puccini classic that figures in the plot of Moonstruck. The operatic flavor is what gives the movie its air of heightened reality. This wasn’t realism. We were in the land of fable and myth.

  As I often did, I summoned up aspects of my own life to fill out my character, the aging mama’s boy Johnny Cammareri. I used my childhood experience with eczema for Johnny’s obsessive scalp scratching. I made him into a wimpy kind of guy who sure as hell would have gotten slapped around in my old neighborhood.

  That spring, I was doing The House of Blue Leaves at Lincoln Center at night and rehearsing Moonstruck at a rehearsal space during the day. One afternoon, we did a series of scenes, all with cast members Louis Guss, Olympia Dukakis, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., Vincent Gardenia, Nicky Cage, and Julie Bovasso. In the close quarters, it soon became obvious that one of us was experiencing gastric distress that day.

  Nobody wanted to say anything, but it got so bad that we began to mutter about it among ourselves. We didn’t have any idea who was cutting the cheese, but someone was. The prime candidate had to be Louis Guss, who played the uncle. He had a practice of staying behind in the rehearsal room after everyone left.

  Before going on in The House of Blue Leaves that evening, I was in the greenroom talking to three of the actresses who were playing nuns in the show. I didn’t want to tell tales out of school, but I wound up mentioning what had happened that afternoon during the Moonstruck rehearsals.

  All three of them immediately broke up laughing. “We know who it is,” they all said practically at once. The person in question was a vegetarian who farted constantly—and it was not Louis Guss. The nuns had done shows with this performer in the past and had experienced the same kind of on-set explosions.

  Before Moonstruck came out, people in my old neighborhood were accustomed to my doing versions of myself: a streetwise bookie, a quick-fisted cop, a boxer. My old friends had always dismissed my performances. “That ain’t acting,” they’d say. “You was just doing you.” I always resented it.

  Now, with Johnny Cammareri, it was different. “Hey, that’s not you this time,” they said, sounding surprised.

  I half-hated my performance anyway. I’m a street guy. I told people that I hadn’t wanted my mother to see the film because I didn’t want her to see me as a weakling. I was embarrassed.

  “Are you kidding?” Norman Jewison said when I told him this. “You’re great in that role.”

  Norman always allowed actors to make suggestions and wound up incorporating a couple of my ideas into the action. There’s a riff where I forget my suitcases on the curb when I’m taking a taxi. The cab pulls out of frame and then slowly reverses back into view. It helped to point out what a discombobulated mess Johnny Cammareri was.

  Directing the scene, Norman must have liked my idea, since he developed it as a running gag. The same thing happens again later in the movie at the Castorini family home, where Johnny forgets his suitcases twice more and has to return for them. We did both scenes over and over. I felt as though I were back slinging baggage at Greyhound.

  Another bit of mine is more subtle. My character is talking to Cher, telling her that he hasn’t spoken to his brother in five years. I hold up my hand. “Five years!” I repeat, then do a dismayed double take at my outstretched fingers. At that point in the plot, the audience hasn’t yet seen Nicky Cage’s dismembered hand. But perhaps on repeat viewings someone would get the joke. His character had lost his hand because my character distracted him.

  Moonstruck was a great critical and commercial hit. Audiences loved the spell that the movie cast. It earned Oscars for Cher, Olympia Dukakis, and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley. Moonstruck probably did more for my career than any movie I had done up to that point. People in Hollywood began to see me in a different light.

  But Moonstruck also left a melancholy aftertaste in my mouth. There I was on the silver screen, playing a character who’s flying to Palermo to see his dying mother. At the same time, during the film’s theater run, my own mother had fallen mortally ill.

  Fans on the street had no way of knowing this. People who had seen Moonstruck came up to me, saying jokingly, “Hey, how’s your mother doing? Is she still dying?” None of it was anyone’s fault. But it still gave me a terrible feeling, because my mother really was dying.

  Mom passed away on June 5, 1988. I miss her terribly but stand in awe of her energy, her love of life, and her devotion to her family. I always say that if my mother had been born a man, she could have been the Pope.

  Pope Frances and Pope Francis, one with an “e,” one with an “i.”

  * * *

  Throughout the eighties, I lost a lot of jobs in show business because of drugs. The cocaine culture ran wild in the film industry. So, yeah, I lost plenty of opportunities because of drugs. Because I didn’t do them.

  I don’t know if it was a leftover influence from my childhood or what. As I said, Mom never had wine on our table when I was growing up. I never developed a taste for alcohol or anything else.

  I grew to have a reputation in the movie business. It wasn’t just that I wouldn’t do cocaine but that I didn’t hide my disgust for it. If someone was ever so ignorant as to push drugs in my direction, I went berserk. It wasn’t a question of a polite “no, thank you.” I blew up. It was
n’t pretty.

  “You offer me that shit? I’ll rip your face off!”

  In 1985, I was asked to step into Harvey Keitel’s role in David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly on Broadway. Harvey had another project. The character in question was a suicidal dope fiend.

  Even from my experience as a nonuser, I felt as though I knew the contemporary drug scene. I could play a motormouthed addict because I had watched people like that, friends of mine who had habits. I studied the behavior. I listened to the jittery speech patterns.

  David Rabe had nailed down those patterns brilliantly. My character Phil had lines such as this one: “Perverse is what she wrote the book on it.”

  The character of Phil freely expressed his despairing vision of the world. Words spilled out of his mouth in furious bursts. He was in every way different from me. A lot of actors coming up today think they must be dark, depressed people in order to get a good performance. That’s bullshit. You don’t have to be a sick fuck to play a sick fuck.

  The show was up at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The great Mike Nichols directed. The cast was packed with terrific actors: Christine Baranski, Ron Silver, Frank Langella, Alison Bartlett, Jerry Stiller, and Susan Anton. The action centers on a group of Hollywood degenerates in the movie business. The stage of the Barrymore was like a small piece of Los Angeles transported to Manhattan.

  The company was one of the finest I’ve ever acted with. All the people involved were professionals who knew what they were doing. That didn’t prevent us from having some riotous times, onstage and off. I loved all of them, but my old pal from the Improv Jerry Stiller stood out.

  Jerry had been there at the beginning of my show business career. He boosted my confidence by always being so positive that I would be a success. Now we were appearing together on Broadway, and life couldn’t get any better. He and I kept breaking each other up onstage. When we lost it too badly, we would hide ourselves by crawling behind a couch in the middle of the set. I would sometimes wrestle him to the floor and tickle him. The audience loved it, thinking it was all part of the show. It wasn’t.