Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  “When I finally got there at the hospital to pick up Michael, his doctor wanted to put me in bed.” Kevin Corrigan’s Michael is sitting in his wheelchair waving his left hand, a goofy look on his face. He’s either oblivious to Henry’s state or completely used to it.

  Kevin Corrigan interacts with Liotta’s Henry more here than in any other sequence. This, too, was a prize for the young actor. “I just loved Something Wild, I wanted to be that kind of actor. I loved his volatility, and also that he was just so precise in his choices, so driven and charismatic. Working with him was like being in a cage with a tiger. I was thinking, ‘Goddamn, this is the big leagues, it’s fucking amazing.’ There was a giddiness with that, too.

  “He was fun to be around, and supportive, and took the job very seriously. He was very much in the world of the film, and that extended to me; he treated me like a brother. He was very preoccupied. Of course he’s preoccupied. He’s the lead in a Scorsese movie. And he’s also playing Henry Hill, a guy who thinks he’s gonna get...whacked.”

  MAY 11: COME ON, GET OVER HERE

  It’s 8:45 a.m. on that Sunday, and nearly two hours into the movie. Michael’s doctor takes one look at Henry and wants to admit him. Henry makes the “I was partying last night” mutter, and the doctor, a warm smile on his face, insists: “Come on, get over here,” and gives him an impromptu checkup.

  Isiah Whitlock, Jr., later to be a familiar and welcome screen presence, is in Goodfellas for only a short period of time, but he makes a strong impression. Whitlock is one of only a few African American actors in the film, and hence he portrays one of the few African American characters, so there’s that.

  But it’s also who the character is and what he does. Michael’s doctor, out of genuine kindness and concern, and without an agenda, tries to look after Henry. He’s under no obligation. What he does is representative of his values, values of giving rather than taking, an inversion of the wiseguy ethos. He’s one of the “suckers” Henry and his crew disdains.

  He is not a criminal.

  In fact, it would be only slightly inaccurate to say that up until this point in the movie, he’s the only adult character who is not a criminal.

  Whitlock, who had moved to New York to pursue acting in 1983, had been in Scorsese’s orbit before. “I was doing work at the Actors Studio, and Paul Newman had come and enlisted a group of students to come over to his house in Connecticut and do a table reading of the script for The Color of Money.” There’s a part in that script for a black pool player, Amos, who quite cleverly hustles Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson, which is what Whitlock read. “I wanted to get that and they ended up getting Forrest Whitaker, rightly, because he was great.”

  A few years later Whitlock was netted into a group audition. “Frank Sivero, who pays Frankie Carbone, was helping Ellen Lewis, wrangling young actors into the auditions. It was off, because I was the only African American in the whole outfit. And I read for the part of Sonny, the owner of the Bamboo Lounge, who was not a black character.” Sonny is Italian American, of the clan if not the wiseguy tribe. “I was a little confused; I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know, I don’t think I would be cast for something like this.’ But who am I to say; that is not going to prevent me from doing the reading.

  “But I was surprised. I got a callback, and I got it fairly quickly. To see Martin Scorsese. I spent some time thinking how I was going to successfully act like this was a routine thing for me to do! When I saw him, he acknowledged the fact that Sonny was not going to be a viable role. He asked me where he had seen me before, and I reminded him that I was one of the actors at the reading Paul Newman arranged. And he said, ‘Right,’ and told me that he had liked me in the role.

  “‘I got a small part,’ Scorsese explained, ‘of a doctor.’ He took me through the setup, the fact that it’s related to Henry’s brother Michael, and so on. And then he said, ‘This is happening at a moment where you’re the only guy Henry trusts.’ And I’ll never forget what Marty said after that: ‘Do you think you can do this for me?’”

  Whitlock was working as a waiter at a restaurant on Manhattan’s 10th Avenue at the time. “I mentioned what had happened to another waiter/actor, and he said, ‘You got a part? I’m going in.’ Which was funny, as if he thought that if I got in, then they were just handing out parts. He didn’t get one. But that production really was the talk of the town among young and struggling actors at the time, and if you got in it was like hitting Lotto. It was one of the first movies I did.

  “And it was interesting, because of what Marty told me about the trust issue. Especially at that point in the movie, the way people are so scared of one another and of getting whacked, you’re sort of taken aback by it. You almost don’t believe it as a viewer: ‘What’s going on here, what’s the connection?’ It’s something you haven’t seen much of in the film.

  “And it’s funny to me, too, because when I see the movie I look like I’m about twelve. People to this day are always kind of very surprised to see me turn up in it. It tells you how long I’ve been around. It has always been great, having been a part of it. I had this favorite Italian restaurant in the Village at that time, and I walked in one day and the owner said, ‘I just saw you in a movie!’ which was odd because it hadn’t yet been released. But he had seen it, and for the next month he bought me dinner and Sambuca whenever I stopped in.”

  The shoot itself was exciting for Whitlock, having not spent a lot of time on any film sets, let alone one as dynamic as this. “They were shooting at an old hospital on the Lower East Side, one that was out of use. And this was late ’80s New York, so the Lower East Side then was a ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ kind of place to go to work. When Martin Scorsese came out to where we were, and told us what he wanted to do, he was very specific about the shots he wanted to get. I had been speaking to Kevin Corrigan a little during the prep time and we’d gotten to know each other a little bit. I hadn’t met Ray Liotta and didn’t know much about his work—you couldn’t Google your potential colleagues in those days—so it was a little interesting when he showed up looking very raggedy, as if he had actually been up all night. And he had been! Not partying or anything; he knew he needed to look sleep-deprived, so he had deprived himself of sleep.”

  The checkup ends with a reprieve for the busy Henry: “He took mercy on me. He gave me ten milligrams of Valium and sent me home.” In the car, his pack of Winstons handily resting over the dashboard, Henry points out the helicopter to Michael, who at first doesn’t get it. “Get the fuck outta here, what are you nuts?” He then at least has to acknowledge the existence of a helicopter.

  What does Michael know and when did he know it? What would you say to an older brother who told you a helicopter was following him? After chastising Corrigan for sharing the old high school pictures of the director a little too freely on the set, Scorsese spoke with the actor at length on the subject of Michael’s ostensible complicity. “I remember conversations with Marty, and I’d ask, ‘How much did I know about him? Did I KNOW he was in the mob?’ He kind of threw a curveball in those scenes when the helicopter’s following Henry around. I had this theory about why Michael wouldn’t know, and finally Marty just came out and said, ‘No no no. He would know.’”

  MAY 11: I WAS COOKING DINNER THAT NIGHT

  Henry Hill took a lot of pleasure in cooking, and in telling people how good a cook he was. After his arrest, while working with federal agents, he used his expertise to charm them. This is a passage from Volkman and Cummings’ The Heist:

  “There were some compensations for the agents, however, chief among them the meals. Accustomed to a diet of fast food, especially in the midst of a major investigation, the FBI men had little opportunity to eat decent meals. Hill, it turned out, had an even greater distaste for take-out cuisine, for he was a trained cook with great culinary talent.

  “He demonstrated it one day after announcing that he would
prepare a grand dinner for ‘us.’ While [FBI supervisor Stephen] Carbone and his agents waited, Hill bustled around the kitchen, frenetically preparing what he promised would be a multicourse masterpiece.” The meal for the agents was a reportedly “exquisite” lobster fra diavolo.

  When Henry gets home from his first jaunt that Sunday, he explains. “See, I was cooking dinner that night. And had to start braising the beef, pork butt, and veal shanks for the tomato sauce.”

  The recipe for the meal, his disabled brother’s favorite, is in Hill’s 2002 The Wiseguy Cookbook: My Favorite Recipes from My Life as a Goodfella to Cooking on the Run, perhaps the best and certainly the most useful of Hill’s post-Wiseguy publishing ventures. I reproduce it, slightly condensed, below.

  MICHAEL’S FAVORITE ZITI WITH MEAT SAUCE

  This was my brother Michael’s favorite pasta recipe. He’d sit in his wheelchair and stir the sauce lovingly all day to make sure it didn’t stick. It uses some meats which are hard to find now. If you can’t find them, substitute a version of them and it’ll still be fine.

  ¼ cup olive oil

  1 pound pork butt (or shoulder), in one piece

  1 pound veal shanks

  6–8 cloves of garlic, minced or thinly sliced (about 2 tablespoons)

  Two 28-ounce cans peeled plum tomatoes with basil, drained, reserving juice

  12 large basil leaves, torn in large pieces, or 1 tablespoon dried

  ¼ cup finely chopped Italian parsley or 2 teaspoons, or 1 tablespoon dried parsley

  ¼ to ½ teaspoon each salt and pepper (to taste)

  Six to eight meatballs

  1 pound cooked and drained ziti

  In a large pot, heat oil over medium heat. Add pork butt and veal shanks and brown on all sides. Remove meat from pan.

  In the same pan, cook garlic over medium heat until soft (do not brown) and add tomatoes, basil, parsley, salt, and black pepper to taste. Bring tomatoes to a boil, breaking them up, and stir once thoroughly, then reduce heat to a low simmer. As the acid from the tomatoes flows to the top, skim it off (after 10–15 minutes).

  Remove bones from veal shanks and coarsely chop meat.

  After 15–20 minutes of cooking, return meat to tomato sauce. Continue cooking at a low simmer, skimming when necessary and stirring briefly right after skimming for four hours (this was my brother Michael’s job). One half hour before serving, add the six prepared meatballs and continue cooking.

  When ziti is cooked al dente, place in a large bowl and toss with the meat sauce. Serve immediately with Parmesan or Romano cheese on the side.

  This may look a little excessive to some, particularly in the meat department. It is, and it’s intentional. I shared the recipe with Missy Robbins, the owner of the acclaimed New York Italian restaurants Lilia and Misi. She said of putting multiple meats in the sauce, “Well, it simply adds depth and different flavor profiles to the sauce, but I’m also guessing in the context of this scene and in general it was a bit of a way to show off how abundant you can be. I do a pork sugo at Misi that has six different kinds of salumi/cured meat plus pork shoulder. It actually started as a way to use all the scraps of meat we had (that happened to make sense to be in the same pot).”

  Some time after corresponding with Robbins, I tried this recipe myself, with a few modifications. (I found that with only two cans of tomatoes, what you were working with was more a stew than a sauce, so I threw in another can.) I have to say it turned out great. If you don’t mind a case of the meat sweats, it’s an incredible meal.

  “I’m gonna make all this meat,” Henry says, looking at the goods. Such is his hurry that he rolls meatballs with a lit cigarette hanging from his mouth. The sauce is not all he’s concocting. There are green beans that he’ll cook in olive oil, and, he says, “I had some beautiful cutlets that were cut just right,” which he would serve “just as an appetizer.” You don’t have time to think about it, but if you think about it, it is touching that he’s going to all this trouble to create such an elaborate meal for his little brother even though it also involves more or less chaining said little brother to a stove for four hours.

  Henry’s plan is to “start dinner early so we could unload the guns.” That’s something you don’t hear every day. What follows also goes by too fast for the viewer to really consider just how absurd is the quandary Henry has backed himself into. Telling Karen “we’re going to your mother’s,” they are off again, to stash the brown paper bag full of guns in a garbage pail inside Karen’s mother’s garage. “Oh God, I can see it,” Karen says of the chopper. The car swerves and into the sound of the skid, it seems, we get a segue into the Rolling Stones’ feral “Monkey Man.” Hiding guns in your mother-in-law’s trash can until you can sell them: hardly the move of a master criminal.

  Their goal accomplished, the couple look up at the blue sky. The movie has up until now mostly been set in the night, the early morning, or indoors. It’s unusual to see Henry in broad daylight. And right now this daylight does not illuminate a helicopter. In a frame full of blue with a couple of fluffy clouds dotting it, Muddy Waters sings, “Everything gon’ be all right this morning.” Henry says, “Let’s go shopping,” and the song changes again, to George Harrison’s catchy, grandiose “What Is Life.”

  But Henry is seesawing. At a strip mall, the camera fast-dollies to him on a pay phone saying, “I’m not nuts.” At a motel, Karen says to one of the unctuous Pittsburgh guys, “I need a hit,” and the unctuous Pittsburgh guy asks her if she wants to see helicopters. Who should call during the guns-and-drugs exchange but Henry’s cocaine-mixing girlfriend, Sandy. Following that, Henry makes a call to drug mule cum babysitter Lois.

  When her airline tickets are freeze-framed during the call, the airline logo is blacked out, in the manner of old tabloid photos of “anonymous” subjects. It’s a mildly startling effect, done because of a practical problem. The production did not get clearance from American Airlines (which one can guess as the airline given the colors red, white, and blue on the papers) to use their logo. Given the purpose of Lois’ air travel, the airline might not have extended permission, anyway. David Leonard of the movie’s editorial department recalls Scorsese making a snap decision: “Just put a black bar over it. We’re making a documentary here.”

  Henry’s detailed instructions to Lois and Michael continue after he and Karen arrive at the house. They include: “Don’t let Karen touch the sauce!” He kisses his brother on the top of the head before going out again.

  At Sandy’s place, a line of cocaine goes up Henry’s nostril and his head reels back. The camera follows and then recedes, showing his face in full close-up, wide eyes and red inflammation around the lower part of his nose. Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” starts up again.

  Scorsese told Christie and Thompson: “I wanted to create for the audience—people who have never been under the influence of anything like cocaine or amphetamines—the state of anxiety and the way the mind races when on drugs. So when Henry takes a hit of coke, the camera comes flying into his eyes and he doesn’t know where he is for a split second. It’s impossible for Henry to recognize what’s important and what’s not.”

  Here Scorsese was drawing on very painful, and eventually life-threatening, experience. The director’s public persona around the time of Taxi Driver was that of a fast-talking, manic ball of cineaste energy, and many still presume that he was doing cocaine in this period. Scorsese, however, says his use of the drug began around the period of New York, New York and The Last Waltz. In The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol recounts a summer 1977 meeting with Julia Cameron, the future creativity guru who at the time was married to Scorsese (and from whom Warhol got Valerie Solanas vibes—Solanas being the woman who shot Warhol in 1968) at which she told him, “Marty has coke problems and he’s got blood poisoning and now he takes medicine to clean himself out.” Warhol’s diaries also include another lurid tale involving Sc
orsese and Liza Minnelli recounted to him by the fashion designer Halston. Scorsese himself rarely if ever discusses Cameron or Minnelli in interviews.

  Scorsese himself wrote about his problems in Projections, a film journal edited by director John Boorman and Walter Donahue. The dependence arose out of a deep despair. Looking at The Last Waltz, the concert film he made with the Band as he was wrapping New York, New York, he says, “I knew it was probably the best film I had made up to that point—I thought—and I still wasn’t happy. Not that you have to be happy every minute of your life, but there was no sense of creative satisfaction. And then I knew I was in trouble because there was a void, there was nothing anymore. So I took more drugs. And finally I collapsed.”

  In this period he met actor Isabella Rossellini (also a daughter of a director Scorsese revered, Roberto Rossellini; her mother was screen icon Ingrid Bergman, of The Bells of St. Mary’s and Notorious among other pictures); although they would marry in 1979, in the timeline of this essay, with the collapse occurring in late 1978, Scorsese admits “it was too late.” The collapse happened at the Telluride Film Festival (the high altitude there likely did not help matters physically): “I remember [...] not being able to sit through a wonderful Wim Wenders film. Wim was there, and I had to tell him; I had to get up and leave because I couldn’t stay in the room, I couldn’t function, I didn’t know what was happening to me. Basically, I was dying; I was bleeding internally all over and I didn’t know it. My eyes were bleeding, my hands, everything except my brain and my liver. I was coughing up blood, there was blood all over the place. It was Labor Day weekend of 1978 [...] I made it back to New York; they put me in bed, and the next thing I knew I was in the emergency ward at New York Hospital. The doctors took care of me for ten days.

  “I stopped taking drugs. During that period I remember talking with Robbie Robertson. He got up and went to the bathroom a few times, and I said to him, ‘You don’t need to go to the bathroom, you can take drugs in front of me.’ And Robbie said, ‘Marty, I’m not taking drugs. I don’t want any. Why should you want me to take them? You did them all! You did every one of them.’ I said, ‘I know, I know.’ He was exaggerating, but it was such a waste of time and energy.”