Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  In his early days, Pesci had also appeared on Startime Kids, a New York–based variety show produced by and aired on WNBC. Its emphasis was on child and teen acts; one of them, besides Joe, was Little Scott Engel, who would move to Hollywood, become a protégé of Eddie Fisher, make international hits from Great Britain as one of the Walker Brothers, and then pursue a solo career as Scott Walker, first making melodramatic Jacques Brel–inflected art pop and then full-on uncategorizable progressive music. Adult Bobby Darin also pitched in on Startime when he was in the neighborhood.

  Pesci was acquainted with Joey Dee and the Starliters, who had a regional ’50s hit with “Peppermint Twist,” and during the 1960s he kicked around the New Jersey/New York nightclub/restaurant/lounge scene a lot, and, as depicted in Jersey Boys, he did work at a bowling alley. In 1968, he cut an album called Little Joe Sure Can Sing, and the disc demonstrated that he could, in a tenor and a falsetto that was very much in the mode of Valli’s. But Pesci’s interpretations of contemporary hits such as “To Love Somebody” lacked the interpretive oomph to put him across as a credible solo act, at least at the time. Issued by Brunswick, the label that launched Jackie Wilson among others, the record was a respectable effort that moved no needles. It was almost ten years following the LP, after he had formed a musical act with Frank Vincent, that both Pesci and Vincent appeared in supporting roles in the aforementioned low-budget, made-in-Jersey gangster picture The Death Collector, which also turns up under the title Family Enforcer on various video-on-demand services. While one couldn’t call it a classic, the story of an ambitious mobster collections guy who oversteps a few too many boundaries (played by Joe Cortese, whose vibe falls somewhere between young De Niro and young Michael Douglas) has, despite its derivations, an almost docudrama feel. The barebones plywood-walled back rooms where the wiseguys play cards, the tacky dining rooms with the green upholstery on the chairs, all feel real, probably because they are. Into this milieu Pesci, as a short-tempered crook, and future Billy Batts portrayer Vincent, as an insolent debtor, fit in like they were to the manner born, so to speak.

  * * *

  The point is that Pesci got around, and in The Death Collector he played a character he knew well. (In Scorsese on Scorsese, the director actually says, “Joe Pesci comes from that world.”) He had been steered into a performing career by his dad on the pretext that he felt his kids should have a better life than he did, and so on. But Pesci has said that he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about performing. But he continued, within the Jersey-NY circuit, and in towns like Newark and Lodi and Union, boroughs like the Bronx, where you see a lot of things. “Stories,” as Pesci put it to Scorsese, that could make the movie “special.”

  That Scorsese and Pileggi were not just willing but eager to accept such a contribution was not a matter of indulging a performer. They understood the value of Pesci’s experience and how it dovetailed with Hill’s experience. Today Pesci does not do interviews with the press, in part because of a reticence that was always there, but has only increased in age, and also because he doesn’t like getting questions about certain aspects of his background.

  The mob and show business have always been in the same bedroom, if not the same bed. Later in the movie Karen, Henry’s wife, played by Lorraine Bracco, will remember the real-life singer Bobby Vinton (who’s played in the movie by Vinton’s namesake son) sending a bottle of champagne to Henry and Karen’s table at the Copacabana. Garry Trudeau, in his comic strip Doonesbury, frequently lambasted Frank Sinatra for his ostensible connections to organized crime. What Trudeau willfully failed to understand was that any US entertainer working a nightclub circuit in post–World War II America rubbed up against wiseguys.

  Nick Tosches’ biography of Dean Martin, Dino, lays out how postprohibition mobsters like Frank Costello bought into legitimate liquor distribution and arranged for exclusives with networks of nightclubs, many of which fronted secret casinos (like Bill Miller’s Riviera in Fort Lee): “Entertainers were like booze,” Tosches writes, “[...] just another way for a joint to make money off the hustlers.” Tosches goes on to recount a hair-raising tale in which Jerry Lewis, then Martin’s partner in a nightclub act, razzed a mobster—a onetime bodyguard for Al Capone himself—from the stage, and lived to tell about it. Not only lived—Lewis befriended the guy and collected big checks from him every year for his muscular dystrophy telethon. Lewis recounted this in detail, and with pride, to Tosches.

  The mob connections of the singing group the Four Seasons are recounted in detail in Jersey Boys. The Broadway show and movie were made with some cooperation from the real-life figures. Frank Vincent, Pesci’s longtime friend, had a blithe attitude about knowing real mobsters.

  Pesci himself is not playful about this kind of stuff, or forthcoming at all. In the late ’90s, when Premiere magazine mentioned Pesci in an article about filmmakers and actors who had strong social ties with Mafia members, Pesci was sufficiently irked that he sent a letter to the editor that made his distaste for film journalists manifestly clear.

  * * *

  On the day the scene was shot, producer Irwin Winkler was on the flea-infested (or not) Hawaii Kai set. So was Terry Semel, the Warner Brothers studio executive who had, at one point early in preproduction, offered that Tom Cruise might make a good Henry Hill and Madonna might make a good Karen Hill. (In his 2018 memoir Who Is Michael Ovitz? the onetime CAA power broker Ovitz takes credit for talking Semel out of these ideas. Many others have, as well. It’s an attractive thing to want to take credit for.)

  In an interview, Winkler recalls, “Terry Semel came to visit that day, and he said, ‘What is this scene, what are you shooting?’ There was a young production assistant with him, named Billy Gerber, who has since become quite a producer himself. He just did Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born. He was there, and he was watching what was going on, and he said to Terry, ‘You know, this looks great, this scene is terrific.’ And Semel shut him up and said, ‘I don’t remember okaying this and why should it be in?’ And eventually he said, ‘You’re not going to Tampa for the zoo scene. It’s gonna cost a million dollars, and I’m not going to approve that.’ That was his punishment to us for the ‘How am I funny?’ scene.”

  Some punishment. Barbara De Fina, the credited executive producer of the film, did the kind of magic that made her an invaluable part of Scorsese’s crew for over a decade; as Winkler puts it, “We ended up shooting it in Queens at night, and we had a sign that said Tampa Bay Zoo, and we put a lot of greenery around there, palm trees, we shot it there.” (Other accounts place the fake Tampa zoo at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Zoo.)

  Pesci spoke in depth about his approach to Tommy and other roles to Mary Pat Kelly, a longtime friend of Scorsese (they met at a convent where she was studying to become a nun, all the way back in the early ’60s, when Scorsese himself was contemplating a monastic existence), for her 1991 book Martin Scorsese: A Journey. “The real Tommy was six-foot-something. I’m not tall. Marty and I were laughing about that the other day. Every time someone tells us something about these guys, they get bigger and bigger. [...] But acting has nothing to do with that kind of reality. People ask if I want to know about the real Tommy DeSimone. I know a lot about him. I read and I talked to people, but I don’t take that stuff into the film with me. Now, Bob De Niro will find out everything about his characters, and take those traits and little things with him, and let it start to feel like that for him. What I do is think of somebody that I know very well who is the same type, and play him. I do my Tommy DeSimone. I do Joe Pesci as if I were this killer, this crazy, funny, wisecracking person. [...]

  “I believe the wiseguys justify what they do the way any soldier who goes to Vietnam, or Korea, or Germany, does. They fight people they don’t know. How do they justify that? How do you justify killing someone you don’t even know? Because a government says it’s okay? They give you a gun and teach you how to shoot it. And if someone in Brooklyn or the Bron
x that helps you feed your family and clothe them, but who, say, runs a bookmaking business or whatever, if they tell you there’s a piece of garbage on the other side of town who is looking to take something that doesn’t really belong to him... They kill their own, within their crime families. They don’t go out on the street and kill ordinary people. Tommy goes overboard. I think he’s a psychopathic killer. He just kills anybody. [...]

  “I can draw on my temper because it’s terrible. My father had a terrible one, and my brother and I have it, too. I have to calm myself down. I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older to control it or to walk away from people, to stay clear of somebody that I don’t like, that will upset me in a way that would make me want to strangle them or beat them to a pulp. So, as Tommy, I use those urges to kill. It becomes nothing after a while. I did one of those murders like it was absolutely nothing.”

  THE FALL OF THE BAMBOO LOUNGE

  It’s an abrupt cut when Tommy disappears from the frame after his “jump” across the table, to a medium close-up of Sonny, the right top of his head now bandaged, saying breathlessly, “But I’m worried, I’m hearing all kinds of fuckin’ bad things. I mean, he’s treating me like I’m a fuckin’ half a f——t some—I’m gonna wind up a lam-ist, I gotta go on the lam from this guy...” The reverse shot is on Paulie, and it dollies in to a medium close-up as he sits and listens. He can’t offer much help to Sonny.

  “Tommy’s a bad kid, he’s a bad seed. What am I supposed to do, shoot him?”

  “That wouldn’t be a bad idea.” Sonny shrugs. Paulie is not amused and in fact looks affronted. It’s not a look one wants to elicit from Paulie. Sonny immediately, furiously, backpedals. “I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean to say that. I just mean that he’s scaring me.”

  Paulie may be offended now, but near the end of the movie, it will be his own brother, Tuddy, who puts a bullet in the back of Tommy’s head and then (as we learn from Henry) shoots him in the face to deny Tommy’s mother the luxury of an open-casket funeral service. An act that would not be committed unless Paulie gave his approval or direct order. So things change.

  While making his complaints about Tommy, Sonny, with some backup from Henry, proposes a more general solution to his Bamboo Lounge problem: Could Paulie buy into the place and then have Henry oversee it, bearing Paulie’s interests in mind? The buy-in would, we presume, ameliorate Tommy’s debt—not that he can be counted on to settle any new tab he would naturally start running up—and possibly usher in a new era of prosperity for the joint, which, as we have seen, is already operating as at least an adjunct to crime: Sonny is in business with Henry, selling stolen goods. (Sonny’s portrayer, Tony Darrow, born Anthony Borghese, was not nearly as hapless as his character. He went on to work as an actor in the De Niro film Analyze This and the entire run of The Sopranos. But he was indicted in 2009, at the age of seventy, for extortion. In a case that showed he was a longtime personal associate of the Gambino crime family, he had tried to get a debt paid by means of a strong-arm collector. In 2013 he was sentenced to six months of house arrest and had to make a don’t-be-a-wiseguy PSA.)

  Paulie demurs at first, but after reassurance from Henry gives in. (Referring to Henry, Sonny says, “He’s in the joint twenty-four hours a day. Another few minutes, he could be a stool,” which is a funny bit of foreshadowing if you consider the gangland meaning of “stool.”) What follows is a little lesson in capitalism, mob style. And it’s not too much different from the legitimate version, just faster. Henry, in voice-over: “Now the guy’s got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie.”

  Paulie, however, has to be paid his weekly protection fee. In legit capitalism this is called maximizing shareholder return. And it has to be done “no matter what. ‘Business is bad? Fuck you, pay me.’ ‘Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me.’ ‘The place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.’” In addition to getting paid without fail, Paulie runs the business into the ground by borrowing on it. Less than a minute after Paulie nods, and after a brisk montage of loading and unloading goods, Sonny is signing the bankruptcy papers and saying, “Fuckin’ shame.” While the torching of the Bamboo Lounge is one of the movie’s very few out-and-out fabrications—that is, it does not occur in the book—in Wiseguy Henry implies the ways in which mob business and so-called legit business don’t mix. Henry buys a lounge in Queens called The Suite, which in the film will be the scene of Billy Batts’ murder. Henry: “Before I thought about taking over The Suite I talked it over with Paulie. He liked the idea. He liked it so much that he ordered the place off-limits for the crew. He said we had to keep the place clean.” They did not manage to keep it clean, and the place did become a mob hangout, to Henry’s consternation; and once Henry was on his way to prison he had to take, as we’ll see, extreme measures with the place.

  Scorsese and Pileggi’s script is a model of narrative resourcefulness. The Bamboo Lounge is now to be torched for an insurance scam, and Henry and Tommy are tasked with the setting of the fire. While they sit in the car waiting to make sure the joint is lit, Tommy complains about his love life. “The Jew broad,” Diana, won’t put out for him. “I been trying to bang this broad for a fuckin’ month now. The only thing is that she won’t go out with me alone, you know?” Henry knows what is up, and turns to Tommy and says, “No.”

  But Tommy is a hard man to say no to, and before he even knows it, Henry is on a double date and enjoying it not at all.

  KAREN

  In pictures such as this one and Casino, Scorsese is apt to shift perspectives with no warning and little regard for conventional linear verisimilitude. Joe Pesci’s Nicky in 1995’s Casino is practically the co-narrator of the film, and it isn’t until the very end that the viewer learns that, unlike De Niro’s Ace Rothstein, Nicky is speaking from beyond the grave. Sure, there’s plenty of precedent for that (see Sunset Boulevard), but pairing a living narrator with a dead one is a bit unusual.

  The kind of French New Wave–derived license used in these cases constitutes a kind of dare Scorsese gives himself: How often can he remind the viewer that they’re watching a movie and still keep them emotionally invested in the happenings on-screen? This is, in a sense, the inversion of what Scorsese’s early mentor John Cassavetes practiced, which was an attempt to immerse the viewer in an unbroken circumscribed reality.

  In the first double-date scene, Henry is fidgety, and he says in voice-over, as the camera makes an elegant arc to isolate Karen and Henry at the table, “I couldn’t wait to get away.” A medium shot of Tommy and Diane tracks in on that couple steadily, as Tommy insists that the party not leave “like a buncha hoboes, staggering out one at a time,” which amuses Diane. There’s a cut to a medium close-up of Lorraine Bracco’s Karen. The white stripe running across the slightly scooped top of her navy blue dress accentuates her tasteful pearl necklace. As the camera pulls back, she takes the voice-over: “I couldn’t stand him.” As much as this shift in linear perspective/continuity is a Scorsese hallmark, Pileggi’s Wiseguy also yields some portions of the narrative to Karen’s telling.

  Many of Karen’s observations come practically verbatim from Wiseguy, as it happens. The narrative sees Henry, after standing her up for their second “date,” eventually amused by Karen’s feistiness when she confronts him in front of his boys, and struck by her beauty. There’s a small but noteworthy difference between descriptions in Wiseguy and in the scripted voice-over of the film. Book: “She had violet eyes, just like Elizabeth Taylor—or that’s what everybody said.” Movie: “She had these great eyes, just like Liz Taylor’s. At least that’s what I thought.” Real-life Henry doesn’t know from Liz Taylor! But Movie Henry does. (And because of the actual color of Lorraine Bracco’s eyes, they can’t be called “violet,” by the way.) He has a something like a sensibility.

  Otherwise, though, Goodfellas doesn’t give Henry much of an inner life. He hasn’t much in the way of a personal ethos, obviously
. But neither is he neurotic. He hasn’t many anxieties or fears. He’s a walking appetite whom we’re rarely made to see as aggressively sociopathic (although the way he laughs a bit in the presence of physical violence is revealing). So his semidelighted reaction to being dressed down in front of his male buddies, including surrogate uncle (at least) Tuddy, by Karen is intriguing. He digs her nerve. Maybe she reminds him of himself. As their relationship deepens into an alliance, it’s one that’s increasingly defined by very definite affinities. She will become a literal partner in crime.

  * * *

  Their courtship contains the movie’s most famous single shot, one that encapsulates and epitomizes the glamour of Henry’s wiseguy lifestyle: the couple’s entry via the kitchen of the famed New York nightclub the Copacabana. The scene was staged and shot at the actual Copa, which despite having mobster Frank Costello as an ostensible silent partner, was a legit joint, but as we see here, its wheels were greased by wiseguy money—it’s doubtful that a Tommy DeVito could run up and run out on a tab here.