Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  If you are not off the bus after Tommy kills the hapless bartender Spider, though, you may have a problem in that moral sentience department.

  The scene is a poker game in what could be somebody’s basement, but given the presence of a jukebox is more likely the back room of a bar. Poker is the game and the players are Henry, Tommy, Jimmy, Frankie Carbone, Anthony Stabile, and Mikey Franzese. Tending the bar is a young guy in a blue pullover shirt, halting in manner, called “Spider.”

  “Hey, Spider, on your way over here bring me a Cutty and water, huh?” Tommy asks, before announcing to the table that he’s gonna play the cards he’s holding. But Spider’s already on the way, slowly, without the Cutty and water, and soon Tommy’s asking if Spider’s got him on the “pay-no-mind list.” Spider’s having trouble following Tommy. The guys find Tommy’s truculent abuse funny, as they will.

  “You walk like fuckin’ Stepin Fetchit,” Tommy bellows as Spider hastens back to the bar. Stepin Fetchit was a Hollywood actor, ostensibly comedic, who was born Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry in 1902. He invented a persona from the play-on-words name up, playing a nasty racist caricature: a droopy-eyed, slow-walking, “laziest man in the world” African American. Wildly successful in its time, his film work is rarely screened today. (In the three films he made with John Ford he got a slightly more dignified treatment than usual; two of these costarred white comic performer and legend-in-his-own-time Will Rogers, who was a close friend of Perry’s.) “Anybody else you fuckin’ run. Run for me, you little prick! Dance the fuckin’ drink back here.”

  Continuing in a vintage pop-culture vein, Tommy asks, “Hey, what’s the movie that Bogart made?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one where he played a cowboy, the only one.”

  Someone says, “Shane?” which Tommy would disdain further than he does but someone else offers The Oklahoma Kid.

  “I’m the Oklahoma Kid!” Tommy exults, waving his gun in the air. And then he shoots Spider in the foot.

  In 1939’s The Oklahoma Kid, directed by Lloyd Bacon, the title role is played by James Cagney, who did a bunch of Westerns; Bogart plays the Kid’s nemesis, Whip McCord. Neither the Kid nor McCord compel anyone to do any bullet dancing. There’s a scene early on in a bar in which Cagney gets the saloon piano player to accompany his singing of “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard,” which is rudely interrupted by Ward Bond as one of McCord’s men. Eventually the Kid is able to hold McCord and his men at gunpoint and he instructs the pianist, “Play, Professor,” as he backs out of the bar and makes his escape.

  This is the only movie talk in Goodfellas. While Scorsese’s pictures teem with nods to other films, it’s only in his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, in which the protagonist is any kind of cinephile; Harvey Keitel’s J.R. prattles at length about John Wayne and Lee Marvin to his very tolerant girlfriend.

  At the next game, the players are one fewer: Franzese is no longer in the mix. Positions at the table are different; Tommy is sitting farther from the bar than he had been. As Spider limps over with a cast on his foot, Tommy mocks him: “Hey, Spider, that bandage on your fucking foot is bigger than your fucking head, you know that?” And so the goading begins, with Jimmy asking Spider if he’s gonna take that from Tommy. (In De Niro’s script notes: “What do I do here that lets Tom get like this? It will be more evident when we prepare to do [the scene].”

  * * *

  “The only line that was consistent was ‘Go fuck yourself, Tommy,’” says Michael Imperioli, who plays Spider. Those four words compel Tommy to shoot Spider four times in the chest, point-blank, killing him. “Every take was different. But it had to get to ‘Go fuck yourself, Tommy.’”

  Imperioli had only been working in film for about a year when he landed the part in Goodfellas. He can be seen in an auditorium scene in the unorthodox pedagogy drama Lean on Me, a March 1989 release, as one of the many no-good Eastside High School students expelled by Morgan Freeman’s principal Joe Clark.

  “When I heard about the auditions [for Goodfellas], I thought, well, as an Italian American actor living in New York, I should definitely be involved.” Most of the young actors who went to Ellen Lewis’ office were given Tommy’s lines to read. “I really thought I was trying out for Pesci’s role,” Imperioli laughs. “Ellen said, ‘Great job, I want you to come back and meet Marty.’ Which made me nervous, because I’d heard accounts of him ‘sitting in judgment,’ so to speak. But he could not have been more cordial. ‘You got the part of Spider,’ he told me, which both elated and disappointed me a little—I really thought I was going to get Tommy, that’s how deluded I was.”

  * * *

  While Imperioli’s subsequent character on the television series The Sopranos, clueless wannabe filmmaker Christopher, is ostentatiously starstruck—“Kundun! I liked it!” he shouts to a Scorsese look-alike while on a nightclub queue in the second episode of the first season—the young actor Imperioli knew better than to gush to his scene partners once he got to the set. As recently as in press accounts of the 2019 movie Joker, anecdotes abound about how Robert De Niro comes to a set to work and has little patience for small talk. Imperioli had an intuitive sense of this, and how to approach the work in general once he got to the set. “I asked the prop master to let me reset the card table after each take. And before the scene was ready, I played as Spider. I would sweep the floor, as if waiting for the wiseguys to arrive.” On one day, De Niro was the first to take a seat at the table. Imperioli didn’t introduce himself. Instead, he said to De Niro, “What are you having?”

  It was a moment before De Niro fully understood, and asked for a Scotch and club soda. “Sometimes on the set, if it’s with guys you already know, you could have some kind of banter because people want to get loose,” De Niro says. “But at the end of the day, you’re shooting the scenes.” He found Imperioli’s approach commendable.

  “When I first rehearsed the scenes, I played Spider more like a wiseass, a younger version of those guys,” Imperioli says. “Marty came after the rehearsal and said to me, ‘I think this kid’s a little slow.’ That was it, that guided my performance from that point on. That makes it more twisted when he’s killed. Marty’s genius is to balance a scene’s elements for a real unexpected impact.” Spider isn’t given any specific characterization in Wiseguy—he’s not the after-hours poker game bartender, he’s just a “kid,” hanging around, that Tommy decided to torture by making him bullet dance. After actually shooting Spider in the foot, the wiseguys put Spider up at their hangout, Robert’s, for a spell, and then one evening Spider refuses to dance and Tommy kills him.

  Pesci’s ad lib after killing Spider—“Whadya want, I’m still a good shot”—adds arguable mordant levity to the shocking scene. There ensues some shouting over who’s going to dig Spider’s makeshift grave (“What is it, the first hole I dug?” Tommy shrugs), and muttering about how Spider is from a family of rats, anyway.

  In Wiseguy, Henry Hill says, “Jimmy just made Tommy dig the hole right there in the cellar [of Robert’s], and all the while Tommy was grousing and pissed off that he had to dig the hole. He was like a kid who had been bad and had to clean all the erasers after school.” With guys like Tommy and Jimmy in your crew, corpse burial became a near-constant concern. (I could find no account of this victim’s body ever being found.)

  As recently as 2013 bodies killed by this crew were being discovered. In June of that year, the skeletal remains of Paul Katz were dug up in a cellar in Ozone Park, Queens. He had disappeared in 1969. The Ozone Park house was registered to Catherine Burke, the daughter of Jimmy “the Gent” Burke and the only Burke family member consulted by Robert De Niro when he was researching Jimmy “the Gent” Conway for Goodfellas. Katz was a trucker whom Burke believed might have been an informant. So he allegedly strangled him and buried him in a property that he had registered to his daughter. Albeit perhaps not at the time of t
he murder, which occurred when Catherine was a child.

  * * *

  The shooting of Spider was on Imperioli’s second day. “Wardrobe put me in a white shirt and tie, and Scorsese changed it to another pullover shirt, like the one in the prior scene. I had squibs on my chest underneath. Things were very well-rehearsed, and I was going to do my own stunt, the fall backward after Tommy shoots me,” Imperioli says.

  Only one thing went wrong. “The prop person didn’t give me a breakaway glass; instead, I was holding an actual drinking glass. And when I fell, my hand clenched around it and broke it, and I cut my palm open. The location was in Queens; they rushed me to the hospital there.

  “The emergency room people took one look at me and put me on a stretcher.” This is something that never happens. Except everyone forgot, in the rush to get Imperioli taken care of, that he has also just had three explosive squibs full of fake blood blow up and through his shirt. “They think I have three bullet holes in my chest.” Once in the ER itself, the doctors tore his shirt open and saw...wires. “I said to the hospital people, ‘I told you I’m in a movie, I just cut my hand.’”

  They were not amused. Imperioli was sent back out into the waiting room and processed and stitched up a little while later. “We did a couple more takes with my stitched-up hand, but I think the first take is what ended up in the movie. Having not seen the entire script, and having shot only two days, I really did not have any idea how crucial that scene was. It really stood out.

  “Which was great for me. A scene like that puts you on the map. ‘I’m in Goodfellas, I’m in this scene,’ and people know exactly what you’re talking about. Spike Lee saw it, and he was casting Jungle Fever, and a lot of Goodfellas people got cast in that movie.” Imperioli is not exaggerating: in addition to himself, Frank Vincent, Illeana Douglas, Debi Mazar, Joseph D’Onofrio, and Samuel L. Jackson worked on Jungle Fever, Lee’s film about an African American/Italian American romantic relationship. Douglas’ scenes were cut, and Jackson’s relationship with Lee predates his appearance in Goodfellas, but the point still stands. “I now have a six-film relationship with Spike Lee,” Imperioli continues—which includes coscripting Lee’s superb 1999 Summer of Sam. Imperioli directed The Hungry Ghosts from his own script in 2009, and recently published an idiosyncratic novel The Perfume Burned His Eyes, about an outer-borough kid in the ’70s who befriends Lou Reed and the musician’s real-life transgender companion of the ’70s, Rachel Humphreys. (Known for many years, and in the book, solely as “Rachel.”) Imperioli remains best known as Spider and as Christopher in The Sopranos.

  KAREN ON THE RAMPAGE

  The two shootings of Spider are punctuated by Karen Hill’s reaction to learning that Henry has a girlfriend, whose way of life Henry is heavily subsidizing, so to speak. The reaction is not good. We see a set of keys going out the bedroom window.

  “Karen, will you grow up? Stop, I’m still gonna go out!” In the ensuing argument Henry throws a dresser lamp over Karen’s head and storms out. As Karen screams, “Get out of my life, I can’t stand you!” the movie cuts to a shot of one of the young Hill daughters, befuddled, standing outside her bedroom door. The screaming continues—and the cut is to Henry’s scream of laughter at the poker game where Spider will be shot to death. He was not even going out to see what Karen calls his “readymade whores.”

  Karen turns up at Janice’s apartment and starts banging on her buzzer. “You keep away from my husband,” she yells into the buzzer panel’s screened microphone. Bracco’s own daughters, Margaux and Stella, playing the two fictional Hill children, stand there looking confused, trying to attach themselves to Bracco’s skirt hem.

  Inside her apartment, Janice, who read in prior scenes as what one might have called “a tough cookie,” is scrunched up on her sofa, terrified.

  “Rossi, Janice Rossi, do you hear me?” Karen punches apartment buzzers with the flat of her palm. One, two, three, four, a series of shots of the white plastic buttons and her hand hitting them. This presages the flash-montage of the prison visitor logbook that sets Karen off in a later scene. This affair is driving her nuts.

  How nuts? A shot from Henry’s POV of a gun in his face, held by Karen.

  “There’s no live ammo on the set, ever,” property master Bob Griffon says. “And it’s all about making sure the actor is comfortable. If the actor has doubts, the prop master can bring in a full-time armorer.” Griffon himself is practically that; “I have pretty much every firearms license imaginable,” he says. For Karen’s gun, he loaded it with dummy ammunition. That is, bullets specially prepared to not go off. “It’s a spent shell and a slug, put together, with no primer and no gunpowder,” Griffon says. “You could fire the revolver all day and get nothing.” Still, the loaded shells help make Karen’s gun a formidable, terrifying sight. On the anniversary edition Blu-ray/DVD of the film, Lorraine Bracco recalls in an audio commentary: “Michael [Ballhaus] had the camera lying down on the bed and if I remember correctly I straddled his knees. And the gun and everything is literally right into the camera. I remember seeing my reflection, and aauugh, once an actor sees itself, it’s a very strange thing.” She, too, was intimidated by the firearm: “I remember asking a hundred times, ‘Promise me there’s nothing in there, show me that there was nothing in the gun,’ because it was horrifying.” A couple of close-ups, one of the trigger with Karen’s finger on it, the other of the gun barrel (which, in letters raised on the metal, reads “.38 S&W. SPL.” for .38 Smith & Wesson Special), heighten the dread.

  The exchange between Karen and Henry loses none of its suspense value despite Karen saying in voice-over that she could never bring herself to physically harm Henry. In Wiseguy she tells Pileggi, “The truth was no matter how bad I felt, I was still very, very attracted to him.” That line is reproduced almost verbatim in the voice-over.

  Henry coos, “Karen, take it easy,” but once he neutralizes her it’s his turn to go nuts. He throws her off the bed, puts a hand around her throat, points the gun at her, pulls her hair, repeats, “How does it feel?” It’s brutal, the yelling and the physical abuse, but this Henry, the movie version of Henry, is self-aware enough, or whatever it is, to hold back. Rather than hit Karen he punches the night table and tosses the weapon.

  “One time the gun went flying and hit Michael Ballhaus in the head,” a mortified Bracco says on the commentary. A cheerful response from Ballhaus is spliced in: “That happens, it’s no problem at all.” Bracco continues: “I remember I bought him a pith helmet.”

  Henry moves in with Janice. The visit there from Paulie and Jimmy is another scene expanded from something only barely mentioned in the book. In this case, a sentence: “Karen called Paulie and Jimmy, and they came by and said it was time for me to go home.”

  Everyone’s friends here. Paulie says to Janice, “Hi, honey, how are ya.” Henry sends her out: “Why don’t you go get some cigarettes.”

  There’s no hint of moral disapprobation in Paulie and Jimmy’s complaint to Henry. Karen’s frantic behavior is proving inconvenient for the both of them, is the thing.

  “She’s wild,” Paulie says of Karen. “And you, you gotta take it easy. You got children. I’m not saying you gotta go back there this minute. But you gotta go back. It’s the only way. You gotta keep up appearances.” At this point Henry might as well be a company man. But he acts like a sullen but smart teen who knows he’s going to have to take his punishment: he looks down, eyes closed, interlacing his fingers. He doesn’t want to hear it and still is going to do Paulie’s bidding.

  Jimmy expresses himself with more self-centeredness, which does not surprise. “I can’t have it,” Jimmy says of Karen’s visits, where she commiserates with Jimmy’s rarely glimpsed wife, Mickey. “This is what it is. You know what it is.”

  The two are going to make it easy for him. Jimmy and another wiseguy were gonna head for Tampa, take care of something. Now Henry’s going with
Jimmy. Take a few days off, get some sun. And then, come home. And come home to Karen. Paulie will smooth it all over: “I know how to talk to her, especially to her.”

  It’s the only way. “You’re not gonna get a divorce,” Paulie says. “You’re not animale.” Of all the things in the world that could possibly make a human being an animal, Paulie believes that divorce is close to the top. He really is Sicilian. (The line, as it happens, was a Sorvino improvisation.)

  “She’ll never divorce him,” Jimmy says, with some De Niro mugging. “She’ll kill him but she’ll never divorce him.” This observation lightens the mood.

  * * *

  Pileggi interviewed the real-life Janice; in Wiseguy she is referred to only by her first name, Linda. She speaks freely, and somewhat disparagingly, of Karen, and affectionately of the wiseguys. She describes her adjustment to her situation and in the book it is she, not Karen, who pronounces, “After a while everything began to feel almost normal.” Henry says of the situation, “My life was a constant battle but I couldn’t bring myself to leave either one. I couldn’t leave Linda and I couldn’t leave Karen. I felt like I needed them both.” In Gangsters and Goodfellas: The Mob, Witness Protection, and Life on the Run, a 2004 “as told to” book by Hill and Gus Russo, Henry refers to Linda by her full name, Linda Rotondi, and tells of breaking off with her in 1974 right before he goes to prison. “I was supposed to turn myself in at nine a.m.; by the time I left Maxwell Plum’s [sic; the Manhattan nightclub was Maxwell’s Plum], it was eleven. The bondsman was going nuts; he was calling Paulie. I was out on a quarter-million-dollar bail, so he was close to losing the farm. He called my wife and asked, ‘Where the fuck is he?’ What happened was that on my way to West Street, which was where the Manhattan Correctional Center (MCC) was located at the time, I stopped at the Empire State Building, where Linda worked. I went to Linda’s office and took her up to the observation desk. And I just told her, ‘Listen, honey, I got ten years to do, sweetheart. I love you. I’ll always love you.’ [...] I broke up with Linda at the top of the Empire State Building just before I went to turn myself in, but we stayed great friends from then on.”