I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else

by Danny Aiello

  If a Q & A is attached to any theatrical piece I have ever done in New York City throughout my career, I can always depend on Jerry Stiller to come unannounced and be part of the audience. He will get up to say the most wonderful things that a friend could say about a friend. He is an angel on earth put there to make people feel good.

  I wanted the original director, Mike Nichols, to direct me in Hurlyburly, but he had opened the show and had already moved on. I was directed by the stage manager and was unhappy about it. Nichols came to watch one of my performances and found me backstage.

  “Hey, Danny, you were great,” he said, gracious as always.

  “Could you imagine how much better I would’ve been if you had directed me?” I said.

  In the play, my character Phil walks around with a baby in his arms, a prop doll. It made for a terrifying contrast, this coked-up crazy carrying an infant. Just before the show was to begin one night, I was in the wings preparing to go on. Christine Baranski was there with her newborn, Lily, about three months old. Her husband was backstage holding the child in his arms.

  I jokingly asked Christine and her husband if they wanted their baby to make her Broadway debut. They smiled but didn’t really answer one way or another. For some reason, I took that as a yes.

  With Lily now in my arms, I walked out onstage to begin the scene. I had a lengthy monologue to perform the moment I hit the stage. The footlights snapped on. I think it shocked the little girl, because she instantly began screaming at the top of her lungs.

  With a squirming, squalling bundle of joy in my arms, I tried to deliver my lines. I didn’t know what to do, so I handed Lily to Jerry Stiller. He took off running back and forth around the stage, rocking the infant in his arms. I swear he began singing a lullaby to her in desperation. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. Lily cried on.

  Jerry passed the baby on to Ron Silver, Ron to Frank Langella, as though Lily were a human hot potato. Meanwhile I attempted to complete my monologue. The whole cast dashed around the stage like the Three Stooges on speed.

  In the end, Christine Baranski’s daughter was probably the youngest child ever to make her Broadway debut. Why I did it, I’m not sure. Maybe I wanted to share the wonderful experience of being on the stage in a Broadway show with someone who might never have that chance. Lily should be about thirty years old right now. If her parents told her about her improvised debut in the theater, it might at least serve as a conversation piece for the rest of her life. It certainly has been for me.

  In 1988, a few years after the Broadway run of Hurlyburly, the play looped back around into my life once again. I made a major push to mount a production in Los Angeles. I contacted producers and tried to line up talent. I reached out to two producers whom I respected very much, Barbara Ligeti and Fred Zollo. Fred had married into the Broccoli family, which controlled the James Bond franchise.

  I wanted to appear onstage in Hollywood. It was a conscious move on my part. People in the film business had to see what I did for a living. Studio heads and movie producers rarely got to Broadway. What they saw of my acting was usually limited to segments in films. I wanted producers to witness the full intensity of my performances. I was more than a fifteen-or-twenty-minute player. I could sustain emotion over the course of a three-hour drama.

  There was another reason why I wanted to revisit Hurlyburly. I felt that a crucial scene had been left out. When I first read the script, my character of Phil had a long exchange with Donna. We called it the “football” scene because both the action and the dialogue centered around the game. I loved the writing and the insight that the passage gave into Phil’s poisonous personality.

  I saw Harvey Keitel’s great performance in the play on Broadway, and I immediately noticed that something was missing in the play.

  “What happened to the football scene?” I asked Harvey.

  “The prick wanted it out,” he said—referring to Nichols, the original director. There was no love lost between him and Harvey.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “For your character it’s the most important scene!”

  Harvey didn’t disagree. I almost refused to step into the role of Phil in the Broadway production because I felt there was a huge, noticeable hole in the play.

  When I went to California with Hurlyburly, I planned on putting the missing passage back in. The football scene was explosive. I didn’t think the show clicked as well without it. I wanted to do the play with the vital piece intact.

  I would have to give up a number of other jobs in order to do Hurlyburly, forgoing offers for two major motion pictures to make $1,000 a week with no expenses. In making the push to do Hurlyburly in L.A., I thought that Sean Penn might serve as my ace in the hole. His talent and prestige could help put the production on the boards.

  Paul Herman, the manager at the Columbus Café and a good friend, had first introduced me to Sean Penn. Even though we were at the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of politics, we became friendly with each other immediately.

  I liked Sean and his whole family: his father, Leo; his mother, Eileen; his brothers, Chris and Michael. Leo was an actor and a director who had been blacklisted during the fifties. I think that’s where Sean inherited his own political activism. Michael was a wonderful musician. I was closest to Sean and Chris, a big bear of a guy with whom Sean had a tight, loving relationship. Chris would play my son in the Paul Mazursky movie The Pickle. I loved that kid.

  I’ll never forget a day at the Columbus Café when Sean walked in and encountered actor Mickey Rourke, who Sean felt had been bad-mouthing his brother Chris. I got to witness the spectacle of Sean Penn’s rage.

  “You ever open your mouth about my brother again, I’ll fucking kill you.” What could Mickey say? He had been wrong and he knew it. He remained mute and merely blinked his eyes in response. Sean stalked off. I’ve rarely seen a human being so broken up as Sean was later on when Chris passed away.

  Having Sean’s talent and prestige attached helped put the L.A. production of Hurlyburly on the boards. In fall 1988 we opened at the Westwood Playhouse for a two-month run, with Sean in the lead role of Eddie, a Hollywood casting director.

  The notices were great. Like I said, I’ve never done a line of coke in my life. But every single audience member during our run left the theater convinced that I was a degenerate drug addict. Sean was superb, and the rest of the cast was terrific, too: Scott Plank, Michael Lerner, Jill Schoelen, Belinda Bauer, and Mare Winningham.

  After Hurlyburly, the Hollywood establishment tended to look at me a little differently. But the play was just the first step in getting my name out there. Another would come not on the stage but on the screen.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Do the Right Thing

  For a brief period in the wake of Hurlyburly and “Papa Don’t Preach,” I found myself hanging out with the most popular and controversial pop superstar of the day. Being with Madonna was one more indication of the strange turn my life had taken. I can’t say we were best friends, but we had a few common interests. We were both raised Catholic and we both enjoyed Sean Penn’s company.

  Madonna taught me a few things, and one of the most important lessons was how to listen to music. I was invited to her home in Malibu for lunch. This was soon after Madonna and I had collaborated on the “Papa Don’t Preach” music video.

  Madonna knew I had a deep interest in music. She wanted my opinion on her soon-to-be-released album, Like a Prayer. I was anxious to hear it. Of course, she had a wonderful sound system in her home, and I thought we’d sit around and listen to her new album in the comfort of the living room.

  “Not in here,” Madonna said, and took me by the hand into the garage. “Here!”

  She sat me in the passenger seat in her Mercedes convertible. “This is the way music was meant to be listened to,” she said.

  At full volume, the music soared. I thought the record was destined to be a hit. I told her so. The critics and fans alike h
ave pretty much agreed that Like a Prayer is one of Madonna’s best albums. It was certainly among the bestselling records of her amazing career.

  From that time on, anything that I’ve ever done, anything to do with preparation—singing, acting, arranging, character development, learning my lines—I’ve done most of that while sitting in my car, sometimes in the garage, sometimes while driving.

  My connection with Sean and Madonna paid off in other ways, too. In the late fall of 1987 I attended a party for Madonna in New York City. The music was pumping in the main room. After a while I got a headache and had to leave. As I was heading out, a stranger stopped me, somebody I had never met and didn’t recognize. He sat all alone in a smaller room near the exit. It was as if he had been waiting there for me.

  “I have a script I’d like you to read,” he said.

  I asked him who he was.

  “Spike Lee,” he said. The name didn’t ring any bells. At this point in his career, Spike was still a relative unknown. He had done some student film work at NYU and released a small feature called She’s Gotta Have It. That night we chatted for about five minutes. I told him I was on my way to Toronto on a film shoot (this was for Moonstruck) and that he should send his screenplay to my agent, Jimmy Cota at Artists Agency in L.A.

  I left for Canada, pretty much forgetting about the whole encounter. While I was working on Moonstruck, Spike’s screenplay showed up. I opened it, took one look at my character’s first scene, and tossed the script aside. My reaction to what I had read was immediate and negative. Spike kept phoning and I kept avoiding him. I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news. Finally I took his call.

  “Look, all I’m seeing in the character you want me to play is a guy tossing pizzas into the air,” I said. “For an Italian-American, that’s tantamount to showing a black man eating watermelon.”

  We talked some more. But I signed off with what I thought was my final word on the matter.

  Spike didn’t quit. He kept reaching out. He invited me to join him at a Knicks game. He repitched me his project. I was still not interested.

  We could not have been more different if we tried. As was the case with me and Sean Penn, Spike and I were the opposite of each other politically. He was a knee-jerk liberal and I was a die-hard conservative. He was a Knicks fan and at the time I was a Boston Celtics fan. He loved Michael Jordan. I loved Larry Bird.

  The Knicks lost that night, and Spike and I parted company without any sort of agreement between us. He still didn’t concede defeat. In the spring he invited me to a Yankees game. Spike and I sat in the stands and talked about the character he had created, the owner and operator of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

  By that time, Spike had made some changes in the script for the better. Sal was still a cartoon, but he had been fleshed out somewhat. There were glimmers of a fully realized human being. My idea was to make the character of Sal more complex. I wanted the audience to think maybe he’s a racist and maybe he’s not. I hesitated to ask Spike if he would allow my input, since I was familiar with writers who feel very protective about their words.

  “How about if I come up with ways to further develop the character?” I asked. “I could make suggestions, and if you like them, they stay in the script. If you don’t like them, we could discuss it. If you still don’t like them, they’re out and we don’t use them.”

  Spike was all for it. I didn’t realize it then, but he always allows every actor in his movies to bring a lot of themselves to their part. His enthusiasm for the project was contagious. He won me over. Sitting there in the stands at the old Yankee Stadium, I agreed to be in Spike’s movie.

  It took a while for him to get his financing in place. Do the Right Thing came together and fell apart a couple times. Paramount had it and dropped it. Universal took it on. Finally, at the end of June 1988, I showed up on the Brooklyn set of Do the Right Thing.

  Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Bed-Stuy.” I recognized the turf. Bedford-Stuyvesant back then embodied all the aspects of urban decay. The neighborhood was not quite as burned-out and blasted as my old neighborhood in the South Bronx, but the crack epidemic had hit it hard.

  I felt very much at home on the set because of the presence of producer Jon Kilik. I first met Jon in the winter of 1980, when I worked on a made-for-TV cop movie called A Question of Honor, with Ben Gazzara, Robert Vaughn, and Paul Sorvino.

  Jon was a production assistant back then—in his words, “number one ninety-eight on the totem pole out of a crew of two hundred.” But we connected on the set and became friends. I had no way of knowing he would turn into one of the visionary producers of the modern day, eventually guiding the Hunger Games franchise to box office glory.

  Spike Lee had a perfect ally in Jon, who was a wizard with film finances. He would be able to squeeze every cent out of Do the Right Thing’s bare-bones six-million-dollar budget and put it all up on the screen.

  The production headquarters for Do the Right Thing was located in the basement of a neighborhood school near the film set, which was on the block of Stuyvesant Avenue between Quincy Street and Lexington Avenue. There were no trailers or even campers for the cast. Instead of dressing rooms, we had areas in the school basement separated by shower curtains. Our actors’ lounge was a TV set and a collection of a half-dozen folding chairs.

  I still recall the sound of crack vials crunching underfoot as we walked back and forth from the school to where we were filming. The grittiness of all that got swept away in Spike’s vision of the movie. There were no drugs in evidence in the plot. Do the Right Thing was like a fable of race relations. Spike’s story had a political reality, not a street reality.

  One small attempt to round out Sal’s character came from my own past. I gave him his last name. “Frangione” was actually a stage name I was going to give myself when I started out in acting. I originally felt that “Aiello” was too difficult to pronounce. (For the record, it’s “I-L-O.”) So I experimented with calling myself “Danny Frangione.”

  My mother would have none of it. “When I see you up onstage,” she said, “I want everyone to know it’s my son Danny Aiello Jr. up there.”

  Do the Right Thing is famously set on “the hottest day of the year.” Tensions in the neighborhood boil over. But behind the camera our set ran without much conflict.

  It was a forty-day shoot. The only troublesome incident I remember involved my son Danny III. The scene centered on an out-of-control mob attacking my character Sal. During the action, Danny III doubled for me. He went down, buried underneath the attacking mob.

  While the scene was being shot, one of the actors spit in my son’s face. All hell broke loose. Danny III wanted to kill the guy. He denied doing it, hiding behind the other members of the mob. But there it is in the finished scene, bigger than life, the jerk-off spitting on my son.

  Things went a little more smoothly than that between me and Spike. We collaborated well. He accepted the adjustments to my character, incorporating lines I suggested into the script. Don’t get me wrong. It was still Spike’s script. Everything that went in was approved by him. Every word is his because it’s his movie.

  I don’t want it to seem like I was responsible for wholesale rewrites, because I wasn’t. But in a few scenes, the words that come out of Sal’s mouth are mine. One scene is where Sal spouts a flowery speech in praise of Jade, played by Spike’s sister, Joie Lee. (It was a nepotistic set. I had my two sons with me. In addition to Joie, Spike’s father, Bill, scored the music for the film and his brother Dave did the still photography.)

  The other scenes I had a hand in included what would become the most cited lines in the movie. In one, Sal talks to his son Pino, who is advocating moving the pizzeria out of Bed-Stuy.

  I never had no trouble with these people. I look around and I see these kids—all these kids grew up on my food, on my food, and I’m very proud of that . . .

  In another scene, Sal talks about the pride h
e has in his business.

  I built this fucking place with my bare fucking hands. Every light socket, every piece of tile—me, with these fucking hands.

  The sentiments were straight from a workingman’s heart, something that I knew well from all the blue-collar jobs I had worked in my life.

  I came up with the “grew up on my food” lines about ten minutes before we were to shoot the scene. I said to myself, Gee, that’s corny.

  “No, that’s not corny,” Spike said. “Keep it in.”

  Do the Right Thing was so timely that film industry people were afraid moviegoers would riot. When Spike and Jon Kilik showed the movie to Universal for the first time, the studio heads were stunned. Spike hadn’t allowed anyone to see dailies. Nobody from the studio could get on set. So the finished film hit Universal like a bomb.

  I was shocked when people in the media stated that Spike’s film would somehow incite violence. That’s not how I saw Do the Right Thing at all. The movie doesn’t leave you up on a roof crying for justice. Spike takes the audience to a whole different place. To me, he managed to lessen the impulse to riot, not heighten it. Do the Right Thing makes you think and makes you talk. And that can never be a bad outcome.

  Most critics loved the movie. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were enthusiastic supporters of both the film and my performance, calling out my line “these kids grew up on my food” as the true heart of the story. I got plenty of accolades for my portrayal of Sal Frangione. Moonstruck was in the theaters. Do the Right Thing was in the can. I had trouble believing it all.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Oscars

  I met Eddie Murphy during my work on Do the Right Thing. He was one of the many celebrities who came by to visit the set of Spike’s movie. By coincidence, I ran into Eddie later on the same day at a restaurant. We had lunch together and exchanged phone numbers.