In 1972, months after Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather made Al Pacino a star, the New Yorker stepped into a grocery store to get a cup of coffee. Charlie Laughton, his friend and acting instructor, waited outside. A woman asked if she had really just seen Pacino. She had. “Oh really? He’s Al Pacino,” she said. “Well, somebody’s gotta be,” Laughton confirmed.
Indeed, somebody does. And we are lucky it turned out be the creative screwball who emerges from this meandering, but not unengaging, memoir.
Observers have always positioned Pacino outside comfortable norms. Early on he was seen as one of those supposedly “difficult” actors whose devotion to the task disrupts production. By way of defence, he describes how, when shooting Scarface in the early 1980s, he insisted a scene be moved back from a nightclub to its original location in a glitzy restaurant. The shift cost about $200,000. “Boom: he’s difficult,” Pacino writes. “Can you believe what he did? He wouldn’t shoot. Even if what I was doing was right for the film.”
In later years, Pacino has emerged as a less abrasive oddball. The world loved his flustered announcement of best picture at the Oscars this year. “And my eyes see Oppenheimer!” he burbled after tearing open the envelope. Pacino himself seems happy to engage with that persona. Sonny Boy features a recent photo of the great man, hooded like one of Tolkien’s Ringwraiths, shuffling down a New York street. “When I look at this picture I scare myself,” the caption reads.
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He has every excuse to live life by his own rules. As Sonny Boy explains, Alfredo James Pacino grew up as part of a troubled family in the roughest part of the South Bronx. His mother spent time in mental facilities and eventually died a tragic death – “like Tennessee Williams had died, choking on her own pills” – but he credits her with keeping him away from the “heroin that killed my three closest friends”. Which is not to say the young Al lived the cleanest of lives. Indeed, in a surprising aside from someone who later attended an AA meeting, he here argues that, as a young man, “drinking saved my life”.
Whatever about that facetious quip on self-medication, Pacino knows what really rescued him was his devotion to the art of acting. An epiphany arrives on page 69 as he talks us through an early role in August Strindberg’s Creditors. “Just like that, it happened. The power of expression was revealed to me,” he writes. “All of a sudden, in that moment, I was universal.”
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There is less lovey speak as he rattles through one of the great arrivals in Hollywood history. Pacino was eye-wateringly handsome and – in notable comparison with later shouty roles – fanatically buttoned-up as Michael Corleone in The Godfather. The stories about the making of that film have been retold so often readers may find their attention wandering as he confirms the studio didn’t want Coppola’s chosen cast and threatened to fire both director and star.
Later we hear of his friendship with the real-life cop who inspired Sidney Lumet’s Serpico and get confirmation how, after an initial critical mauling, the hip hop set rehabilitated Scarface. He is, however, not on board with the critical reappraisal of William Friedkin’s Cruising. That 1980 thriller, set among New York’s gay community, is dismissed as “exploitative” over a few terse paragraphs that end with him noting he gave his fee to charity.
It would not be a Hollywood memoir if no scores were settled and Pacino does want it made clear that his absence at the 1973 Oscars was not, as rumoured, down to his feeling slighted at being nominated in best supporting actor rather than best actor for The Godfather (not that that would have been an unreasonable complaint). Elsewhere, however, the book is largely good-natured to colleagues and alert to his own errors as middle-age looms.
The tales of his money troubles are baffling and hilarious. “He is an idiot,” Diane Keaton, then his partner, says of Pacino as she and the accountant contemplate insolvency. A mere 50 pages later we hear how, again close to destitution, he “rented out a whole floor of the Dorchester hotel in London” after flying over on a “gorgeous Gulfstream 550″.
The amiable, rambling style in the latter sections makes all this profligacy easy to forgive. The book looks to have ended at the close of chapter 13 when he recalls a question from James Lipton on how he would like to be greeted at the Pearly Gates. “I hope He says rehearsal starts tomorrow,” Pacino writes. Curtain down? No, we get another two chapters musing on death, Covid, memory and buying tampons for mom. As one closes the book one imagines the voice out there on another plane still weaving eccentrically for chapter after unpublished chapter.
Yes, someone had to be Al Pacino. Thank goodness.
Donald Clarke is a film critic for The Irish Times
