I am not a fan of audio books. I prefer pages and ink. However, if you have any interest in Al Pacino’s new memoir, Sonny Boy, I urge you to listen to the actor read it himself. The text offers many pleasures, but it is also ragged and discursive, full of anecdotes that end before they’ve gotten to their point, the 84-year-old author at times chasing memories like a cat swatting at a laser pointer. For both good and ill, reading Sonny Boy is like spending several hours with a beloved elder—your charming uncle, say, given a bit more to rambling these days—so why not get as close to the full experience as possible? Plus, it’s Al Pacino, so: that voice.
One example of what I mean by “ragged”: the actress Beverly D’Angelo turns up abruptly three-quarters of the way through, in the not exactly minor role of mother of Pacino’s twins. (He has four kids altogether; you will have to look outside Sonny Boy to learn who the other two mothers are.) So Pacino and D’Angelo were a couple? That seems like something you’d include in an Al Pacino memoir! But aside from the fact that they procreated, he mentions only that he and she “had our issues about where to live.” And then, at the bottom of the sole page touching on this relationship: “We were working through the whole gestalt of raising our kids without each other.”
Easy come, easy go. And moving along …
Pacino, in collaboration with Dave Itzkoff, the former New York Times culture reporter (and author of a well-reviewed biography of Robin Williams), is much better on his childhood. He grew up poor in the South Bronx, living in a busy three-room apartment with his single mom and his grandparents, while getting into just the right amount of trouble on the streets. “We’d scale to the tops of tenements and jump from one roof to another,” he writes. “We hitched to the backs of buses, jumped over turnstiles in the subway. If we wanted food, we’d steal it. We never paid for anything. Making mischief and running away from authority figures was our pastime.”
Unlike his friends, Pacino was torn between juvenile delinquency and more upstanding pursuits, such as playing organized sports and not wanting to upset his mother. A point of personal interest: one of Pacino’s three best pals was named Bruce, a name not usually found in accounts of gritty, urban, 1950s Italian-American childhoods. Unfortunately, Bruce and the other two members of Pacino’s adolescent crew, Petey and Cliffy, would all die of drug overdoses in young adulthood, even as Sonny, the name by which Pacino was then known (hence his memoir’s title), was becoming one of his generation’s greatest actors and most iconic movie stars—well aware that these are two different occupations. He takes the former seriously, the latter less so.
His first sense that he might have a calling—and a presence—came in junior high school, after he was selected to recite Bible passages at student assemblies. “When I read from the book of Psalms in a big booming voice—‘He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart’—I could feel how powerful the words were. Because words can make you fly. They can come to life. Like my friend Charlie [an acting mentor] used to say, the word made flesh, to borrow another Biblical phrase. That’s what I thought acting was, just saying beautiful words and trying to entertain people with them.”
He became a regular in school plays, enrolled at the High School of Performing Arts, studied at the Herbert Berghof Studio and eventually the Actors Studio, worked crappy jobs on the fringes of show business (movie-theater usher, trade-paper delivery boy), drank and drugged too much (foibles about which he’s admirably frank, along with his hopelessness at handling money), enjoyed early triumphs Off Broadway and on (an Obie and a Tony), and was eventually cast in four era-defining movies in four years: The Godfather (1972), Serpico (1973), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Dog Day Afternoon (1975). I mean, come on.
But then, in 1977, he made Bobby Deerfield (“Not a great film,” he admits); Cruising, in 1979 (“an exploitive film”); Scarface, in 1983 (“A flop—not commercially, but critically. Artistically. Spiritually”); and Revolution, in 1985 (“a disaster”). Well, it’s been a long career. Happily, he won the Oscar he should have won in the 70s for Scent of a Woman (1992), while Scarface and its campy excesses, not least of which is Pacino’s scenery-snorting performance, have only grown in stature over the four decades since its release. “The residuals [from Scarface] still support me,” he writes. “I can live on it. I mean, I could, if I lived like a normal person. But it does contribute, let’s put it that way.”
Now, how about some Godfather stories? Pacino’s account of making the first two films will be mostly familiar to anyone who has read the oceans of words already published on the subject, but this anecdote was new to me: the director, Francis Ford Coppola, suggested to Pacino that he and Marlon Brando have a private lunch before filming their first big scene together, the one in which Pacino’s Michael discovers Brando’s Don Vito unprotected in a hospital following an assassination attempt. Pacino, still a pup, cast in only his third film, was reluctant to sit down one-on-one with Brando, a childhood idol: “Seriously, it fucking scared me. He was the greatest living actor of our time…. But Francis said you have to and so I did.”
The two actors’ lunch took place on location, in an empty patient room in an actual Manhattan hospital:
“He was sitting on one hospital bed, I was sitting on the other. He was asking me questions: Where am I from? How long have I been an actor? And he was eating chicken cacciatore with his hands. His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face…. He looked at me in a quizzical way, as if to ask, What are you thinking about? I was wondering, What is he going to do with his hands? Should I get him a napkin? Before I could, he spread both his hands across the white hospital bed and smeared the sheets with red sauce, without even thinking about it, and he kept on talking. And I thought, Is that how movie stars act? You can do anything.”
Readers who want to learn what it was like to perform opposite Brando, toe-to-toe, will have to look elsewhere. It’s not that Pacino is falsely modest, but he often seems reluctant to toot his own horn—a quality that is both disarming and frustrating in a memoirist.
He includes a telling anecdote about the way “everything changed” in his life post-Godfather. One morning, he ducks into a store for a cup of coffee while his friend and mentor, the aforementioned Charlie, waits on the sidewalk.
A woman walks up and asks, “Is that Al Pacino?”
“Yeah,” Charlie replies.
The woman is skeptical: “Oh, really? He’s Al Pacino?”
“Well,” Charlie says, “somebody’s gotta be.”
That, in a nutshell, is the spirit of this memoir: half–victory lap, half-shrug.
Bruce Handy is a journalist, children’s-book writer, and the author of a forthcoming history of teen movies, Hollywood High
