Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  “I dressed like a gangster, like when Elaine Kagan, Henry’s mother, opens the door in the movie! I was wearing a jacket and tie and cuff links. That’s how I found out I was up for the part of Ray Liotta’s brother. I didn’t think I looked like him, I convinced myself that I did. I guess Marty thought that I did. We made small talk. He saw on my résumé that I had been in The Lemon Sisters and he mentioned that it was being edited downstairs. I couldn’t help myself, I blurted to him, ‘I love your films and I’m a huge fan!’ I was very emotional. He could see the state I was in. He took it in stride: ‘I could use that, it’s early in the day!’ he said. I got the call that I got the part later that day.”

  * * *

  Once on the set, Corrigan says, “Exhilaration is an apt term. I was so excited it took me out of the story, I felt like a bat boy on the Yankees during the World Series, just being allowed to walk out on the field, it was vivid on the set. When I watch the movie now and I see all the colors in the movie, all those dark red hues, I remember walking through those colors and being in it and being aware I was in it, and walking through the looking glass, into Alice in Wonderland, it was Scorsese Wonderland.”

  * * *

  This is a busy, almost hurried sequence. It begins with the crushing of a glass, a crucial component of a Jewish wedding ceremony. On introducing Henry to her mother on their first date, Karen hurriedly covers up the cross that Henry wears around his neck. When Karen’s mother tells him that Karen has told her he is half-Jewish, he picks up the ball without a blink and says, “Only the good half.” Pileggi’s book details how Hill underwent a full conversion to Judaism before marrying Karen, and underwent circumcision as an adult, a rather painful undertaking. (In the book, Linda, a postmarriage girlfriend of Henry’s, says of Karen: “[She] was a very strong, demanding person. She put a lot of pressure on him. When they got married, for instance, she had him convert. He was twenty or twenty-one at the time, and she made him get circumcised. It was horrible. He was walking around with a diaper for a month.”)

  The snapping of the wedding photo features a whiteout in one shot, recalling the disconcerting flashbulbs of Raging Bull and the later film The Aviator. Scorsese himself projects his own loathing of flashbulbs onto his characters as much as opportunity allows him to. The wedding photo minimontage features a whip pan that resolves very briefly on Henry’s side of the family, and the still extremely disgruntled look on the face of Henry’s father (Beau Starr), from whose influence and belt Henry presumably escaped some time ago, is potent.

  The most honored guests are seen in a horizontal tracking shot that begins with a swivel at the table where the more serious wiseguys sit: Paulie, Tuddy from the back, and then in profile, Jimmy. Vinnie (Charles Scorsese, the director’s father), who will be heard from more decisively in the prison scene and after, is seen from the back; he’s wearing a hearing aid. Tommy is being harangued by his mother (Scorsese’s own mother, Catherine) about getting married; she, too, will figure more strongly soon. There’s Morrie and wife, Belle, some mob wives, Frank Carbone, Frenchy.

  “It was like we had two families,” Karen says in voice-over; the play on words with respect to “family” is not emphasized. “There must have been two dozen Peters and Pauls at the wedding, plus they were all married to girls named Marie.” There are no boxed wedding presents: just envelopes stuffed with cash, the friendly face of Ben Franklin looking through the plastic window, and in cut after cut after cut, hand after hand after hand gives an envelope to Karen. Prop master Bob Griffon recalls that such envelopes, another detail Scorsese was particularly concerned about getting right as far as his memory of them was concerned, were particularly difficult to conjure: “They’re very ornate on the outside and you can see the cash inside them. Marty was adamant that that’s how they used to do it in Little Italy. I went to several stationeries and gift shops—keep in mind, this is thirty years ago. Nobody ever really remembered it like that. So we ended up—at the time, I used to use a graphic artist at Saturday Night Live, and he just made them. He printed them in gold foil somehow and die-cut the envelopes and it worked. So many people have asked me about them. I wish I still had a few of them.”

  As Karen and Henry dance, she worries that the bag in which she put all the envelopes will be stolen, and Henry laughs. Here, among thieves, is the safest place for them. Karen, for the first of two times in less than ten minutes, speaks of finding life in Henry’s world as disorienting, intoxicating.

  * * *

  Corrigan was raised in the Bronx, and he says that while watching the construction of the ornate wedding scene, “It was interesting, too, how it seemed to intersect with my notions of my parents’ generation.” As, too, with the emphasis on particular details of the Copa in a prior scene, Scorsese was putting on a mini-memory-play.

  As it happens, an old childhood friend of Corrigan’s dad had gone to Cardinal Hays High School with Scorsese. “He made copies of yearbook pages, and I brought them to the set one day to show Marty and Marty got a real kick out of them. But when I started showing them to the other actors, he asked me to please stop.”

  * * *

  The honeymoon period for Henry and Karen is brief. On a night he doesn’t come home—they’re still living with Henry’s in-laws, and they’re up and worrying with Karen—we are miles away from the feral chivalry of the Henry who pistol-whipped Bruce. He laughs with real disdain at the very idea of being told what to do as he gets back into the car with Tommy.

  JEW HEAVEN

  Forty-five minutes into the movie, after Henry walks from the front door of his in-laws’ house and back into the car with Tommy, chortling his hearty “fuck you” laugh, the movie gives us ten minutes or so of Karen’s world.

  Karen picks up the voice-over.

  “Well, we weren’t married to nine-to-five guys. But the first time I realized how different was when Mickey had a hostess party.” The motorcycle crash from the song “Leader of the Pack” accompanies a backward dolly of a crowded dining room, with a cardboard cutout of a Jackie Kennedy–style woman presiding over the festivities. The gathering was initially conceived as a Tupperware party (housewife entrepreneurs of the era would host events to sell the kitchen storage supplies), but the company did not want to be associated with a gangster picture; then the idea was a Mary Kay party (same, but with cosmetics). The cardboard standee indicates the gathering has some sales function, but that’s the end of it. A close-up of Karen, alone in the frame, looking dumbstruck, underscores a sense of isolation and alienation. Into the frame, from the right side, enters the smiling profile of Rosie, played by Illeana Douglas.

  “Karen, where you from?”

  “Lawrence.”

  A reverse shot shows Rosie, full face, saying Lawrence, on the island, is nice. A medium shot of the two characters shows that Rosie is rubbing hand cream on Karen, demonstrating a product.

  “I’m from Miami. You ever been there?”

  “No.” It’s the softest voice we’ve heard from Karen.

  “It’s okay, but it’s like you died and went to Jew heaven.”

  The phrase “Jew heaven” is emblematic of suburban American anti-Semitism: casual, “humorous” in intent, compressed in its venom. But the venom is there. (When I was a teen in New Jersey I was rather stunned to hear one of my mother’s friends, in every other respect a very “nice lady,” and also a genuinely kind person in general, refer to a higher learning institution as “En Why Jew.”)

  Illeana Douglas is the paternal granddaughter of Golden Age Hollywood icon Melvyn Douglas, the guy who made Garbo laugh in the 1939 comedy Ninotchka. That connection did not do much to facilitate her career as a movie actor. She recounts her eccentric East Coast upbringing and New York acting-school dues-paying in her funny and engaging memoir I Blame Dennis Hopper.

  She met Scorsese when they were both working in the Brill Building. Douglas, while taking acting courses and pursuing au
ditions in film and theater in New York, made ends meet in the office of the powerful film publicist Peggy Siegal.

  One of her more unpleasant tasks was to call prominent critics to get their reactions to a movie Siegal was representing. In her book she recounts having David Denby hang up on her when she contacted him to get a prereview reaction to Beverly Hills Cop II. The same David Denby who Nick Pileggi believed was prank-calling him, pretending to be Martin Scorsese. Following this mortification, though, came an encounter with the director Frank Perry, whose past work Douglas, a lifelong movie nut, revered. (“My show business knowledge, which not everyone who gets into the publicity business has, was considered a skill,” Douglas says. “To know that songwriter Adolph Green was married to actress Phyllis Newman, but that his professional partner was Betty Comden. That made me invaluable in the office, because I knew who everyone was; Peggy or someone else would flash a headshot at me or something, and I’d say ‘That’s So-and-So, and he’s on Broadway in This-or-That.’”)

  Now, Perry is helming a Shelley Long–starring reincarnation comedy, Hello Again, and has neglected to cast a small speaking part. He pulls Douglas out of her office, into his, has her read two monologues, then takes her directly to the set from there to shoot the scene, in Douglas’ telling.

  “The story, which sounded as if a famous publicist like Peggy Siegal had made it up, immediately made its way through the halls of the Brill Building. I was excited because people finally started identifying me as an actress. One of these people was Martin Scorsese’s assistant, who asked for my résumé,” Douglas writes. A little later, she recounts: “I was at work and I got a call from Marty’s assistant. It sounded very conspiratorial: ‘Hey, I was reading your résumé. Do you really have a bloodcurdling scream?’”

  The director was looping dialogue for Last Temptation and needed some screams. (Shades of the 1981 Brian De Palma thriller Blow Out, in which the sound man played by John Travolta is tasked with finding a credible scream for a cheap horror movie, which drops him into a web of murder and conspiracy and so on.) A brief and loud scream demonstration clinched the gig, and the next day she was in the “loop group.”

  The actor and the director bonded over comedy. Douglas dropped a line from the classic comedy character “The 2,000 Year Old Man,” created by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. Brooks and Reiner were television comedy writers in the 1950s, not yet known as performers and also a good deal removed from becoming filmmakers; they created the bit to amuse friends at parties, initially. The premise has straight man Reiner interview Brooks, as a guy claiming to be 2,000 years old, about the historical figures he had met over the course of his epochal life. (“Jesus? He was a nice boy. Wore sandals. Thin. He came into the store but he never bought anything.”) Douglas’ reference perked Scorsese right up. “How do you know that?” he asked.

  As Douglas points out elsewhere in her book, the image of a comedy-loving Scorsese doesn’t square with, say, the fast-talking lunatic that he plays in the back seat of Travis Bickle’s cab in Taxi Driver. But his films, particularly the contemporary ones, are steeped in humor derived from stage and cinema and television. You don’t have to be conversant with Abbott and Costello, the ’40s comedy superstars, to laugh at the back room exchange, full of self-conscious buddy-buddy schtick, between Charlie and Johnny Boy early in Mean Streets. But if you know Abbott and Costello, knowing where these guys picked up their double-talk from is an insight into their characters.

  Scorsese subsequently cast Douglas in Life Lessons, a segment in the 1989 anthology movie New York Stories. Douglas plays the cynical best friend of Rosanna Arquette’s Paulette. It’s a short but meaty role in the tradition of Eve Arden or Glenda Farrell, two old-school performers prominent in Douglas and Scorsese’s philosophy.

  Douglas and Scorsese became romantically involved. The director and Barbara De Fina were married at the time; they were officially separated around the time of Goodfellas’ release. Scorsese seems to have attempted to keep the strands of his professional/personal involvements segregated. In interviews, neither De Fina nor Douglas recounts any unpleasant interactions with the other. For Douglas’ part, she said that Scorsese had given her to believe, at the relationship’s outset, that he and De Fina were living apart. De Fina’s response when I mentioned this to her was an eye roll.

  In any event, Douglas was caught up in Goodfellas fever before it was clear that she’d be involved in the movie. “The casting of Goodfellas was top-secret stuff,” she writes. “I was privy to hearing about and sometimes even seeing every actor or actress that was even in consideration, but I was sworn to secrecy. Listen, I knew that I was in consideration, and Marty wouldn’t confirm or deny if I was going to be in the movie, and we were in a relationship.”

  Once production started, she writes, in an account echoing the recollections of supporting players such as Michael Imperioli and Kevin Corrigan: “Word was spreading about Goodfellas, and actors, mobsters, you name it, were requesting if they, too, could come down just to get a glimpse of Robert De Niro. In some neighborhoods a carnival-like atmosphere developed and folks were having cookouts and sitting in lawn chairs outside places where they were shooting. It was like they were part of the atmosphere and Marty harnessed that energy and put it into the film.”

  Douglas was visiting the set well before she was cast. Scorsese had given her the book Wiseguy before the shoot began, and he would ask her to visit the set for certain scenes: “Why don’t you come down, it’s gonna be fun.” When she read the book, and then the script, she told Scorsese she was interested in the role of Sandy, the hard-bitten friend of Henry Hill’s mistress, Janice, who becomes a love interest of sorts to Henry after he enlists her in his drug-dealing business. She recalls saying to Scorsese, “That’s the good part,” to which he responded, “Nah, nah, you’re not ready for that.”

  As it happens, the unclear-product retail party for which Douglas got the role of Rosie was Douglas’ own idea. “Marty would talk to me about what was going on in the run-up to shooting. The actors were coming in and doing character-based improvs every day, recording the improvs, and then typing them up, incorporating them into the shooting script. He really had his hands full with that. And he said, ‘I haven’t given much thought to the scenes with Karen.’ Particularly with the way she got drawn into Henry’s world and the world of the other mob wives.” In Wiseguy, the event Karen Hill describes wherein she first finds out “how different [Henry’s] friends were from the way I was raised” was a hostess party where one of the mob wives was selling copper-and-wood wall decorations. “I suggested, what if I stage a Mary Kay party at my apartment, and we invite all the women in the movie, have the production designer and the art people photograph it, as we do improvs. That became the basis of what went into the movie.”

  It’s quite a whirlwind of activity. Women making each other up and sassing each other—“Angie, stop picking at that!”

  “I’d like to smack his face”—a quick shot of a giant beehive hairdo—“You think you got problems, what about Jeannie’s kid,” “Well, you know Jeannie drinks,” and so on, and on to the sad tale of one absent wife whose husband is off to prison.

  “They had bad skin and wore too much makeup,” Bracco’s Karen says in voice-over. “They looked beat up.” And indeed, many of them probably were. In Wiseguy, Karen goes further: “They had missing teeth. You never saw mouths like that where I grew up. Also, they weren’t very well-dressed. The stuff they wore was unfashionable and cheap. A lot of polyester and double-knit pantsuits. And later, when I met their kids, I was amazed at how much trouble their kids gave them. Their kids were always in trouble. They were always in fights. They wouldn’t go to school. They’d disappear from home. The women would beat their kids blue with broom handles and leather belts, but the kids didn’t pay any attention. The women seemed to be on the edge of just making it. They were all very nervous and tense. Their younger kids looked dirty all the tim
e. It was that thing some kids have of looking dirty even after their baths. That was the look.”

  In contrast to this near-Dickensian evocation of deprivation, Scorsese plays the scene for dark, disorienting humor. “When Henry picked me up I was dizzy,” Karen says of the party. (The wedding had made her feel “drunk.”) The sequence’s bluntness and slam-bang pacing create a similar alienating effect on the viewer.

  * * *

  As for “Jew heaven”?

  Having set the scene in an improvisation, Douglas asked Scorsese whether she’d be in the shoot. “He goes, ‘We’ll come up with something, we’ll come up with something.’ At that point I just was, you know, an excited participant. When it came to actual lines, I didn’t have any idea when the shoot began. I remember being a young actor thinking, ‘When the camera is on you, just talk.’ My grandmother was Italian, so I came up with a name, Rosie, that was my grandmother’s sister and, I told myself, I’m gonna be my grandmother and say anything that my grandmother might say—but within the logic of the scene. You can’t improvise willy-nilly. But yes, ‘Jew heaven’ was something that my grandmother always said about going to Florida.” (Douglas would use the phrase again on the HBO series Six Feet Under, playing a blunt mortician.)

  “The atmosphere on set was really fun, almost carnival-like. And Marty again was such a great audience. I mainly just wanted to make Marty laugh. If I heard him laughing...you know, that’s a good sign.”