Sonny Side Up
Al Pacino’s personal life has been a bit of a train wreck, but his new memoir leaves no doubt that acting has been the most important thing in his life.
A review of Sonny Boy by Al Pacino, 384 pages, Penguin Press (October 2024)
I.
When I’m reading celebrity memoirs, I’m usually tempted to skip the first few chapters. I generally don’t care about the family history, the toddler years, or the misadventures of adolescence. I want to jump to the parts of the story I know best—the books they wrote, the films they made, the songs they played, and so on. I’m glad I overcame that temptation when reading Al Pacino’s new autobiography, Sonny Boy. Pacino has been famous for most of my life. I’ve been aware of him since the early 1970s, even though I was too young to see the Godfather films or Serpico or Dog Day Afternoon when they were first released. He was one of those actors who was so famous that even those unfamiliar with his movies knew who he was and recognised his face when it appeared on the front of a magazine.
Even so, I’ve never known much about Pacino’s early life. He wasn’t one of those raconteurs who frequently pitched up on late-night talk shows to promote his work, and I never saw him telling stories about his youth to Johnny Carson or Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas. Not until I picked up his memoir, published in the 85th year of his life, did I discover just how hardscrabble his early years were. Those early chapters are probably the best in the book. They are certainly the most moving. And they help to put everything that came afterwards—the critical successes, the fame and fortune, the troubled relationships with glamorous women, the awards, and so on—into perspective.
Alfredo James Pacino was born in New York City on 25 April 1940 (almost exactly one year after the birth of director Francis Ford Coppola). His mother Rose was the daughter of immigrants who had come to America from (appropriately) the Sicilian town of Corleone. His father Salvatore was himself a Sicilian immigrant from a town called San Fratello. Pacino’s father and mother divorced before their son’s second birthday.
After that, Pacino rarely saw his father, who eventually moved to California and cycled through an additional four marriages. Pacino’s mother was left impoverished by the divorce. “The first couple years of my life,” he recalls, “my mother and I spent constantly moving around, no stability and no certainty. We lived together in furnished rooms in Harlem and then moved into her parents’ apartment in the South Bronx. We hardly got any support from my father. Eventually, we were allotted five dollars a month by a court, which was just enough to cover our room and board at her parents’ place.”
When Pacino was about four years old, he was sitting in the balcony of a New York City movie theatre with his mother when he spotted his father walking up the aisle on the ground floor. This was during World War II, and Salvatore, now a military policeman on temporary leave, was wearing his uniform. Pacino called out to his father, “Dada!” His mother tried to shush him but it was too late. His father spotted the two of them and joined them in the balcony. This recollection brings out the best in Al Pacino the memoirist:
When the film was over, I remember walking on the dark street at night with my mother and father, the marquee of the Dover Theater receding behind us. Each parent held one of my hands as I walked between them. Out of my right eye, I saw a holster on my father’s waist with a huge gun pouring out of it, with a pearl-white handle. Years later, when I played a cop in the film Heat, my character carried a gun with a handle like that. Even as a little child I could understand: That’s powerful. That’s dangerous. And then my father was gone. He went off to the war and came back, but not to us.
The early parts of Sonny Boy are filled with poignant moments like that, and they tend to inspire Pacino’s best writing. Eighty years after the theatre encounter, he still recalls it with greater clarity and insight than the making of, say, Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, which he only made about five years ago. And although it probably wasn’t intended this way, Pacino’s memoir provides a touching account of what immigrants bring to the American melting pot:
The other families in our tenement were from all over Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. You heard a cacophony of dialects. You heard everyone. Our little stretch between Longfellow Avenue and Bryant Avenue, from 171st Street up to 174th Street, was a mixture of nationalities and ethnicities. In the summertime, when we went on the roof of our tenement to cool off because there was no air-conditioning, you’d hear the murmur of different languages in a variety of accents. It was a glorious time: a lot of poor people from various ghettos had moved in, and we were making something out of the Bronx.
Rose Pacino was a lovely woman who dreamed of a glamorous life but wound up living with her parents and her child in a three-room apartment that was often occupied by as many as six relatives. The movies were her escape from the drabness of her life, and she almost always took her Sonny Boy (the nickname was inspired by an Al Jolson song) along with her, even if the movie wasn’t appropriate for a young child. Thus, even at the age of five, Pacino was acting out scenes from films such as Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder’s 1945 Best Picture Academy Award-winner about an alcoholic writer, played by Ray Milland, whose life is spiralling out of control. Pacino writes:
I couldn’t forget the scene when he’s sober, searching frantically for the booze that he squirreled away when he was drunk but can’t remember where he hid it. I would try to perform it myself, pretending to ransack an invisible apartment as I scavenged through unseen cabinets, drawers, and hampers. I got so good at this little routine that I would do it on request for my relatives. They would roar with laughter. I guess it struck them as funny to see a five-year-old pretending to scramble through an imaginary kitchen with a kind of life-or-death intensity. That was an energy within myself that I was already discovering I could channel. Even at five years old, I would think, What are they laughing at? This man is fighting for his life.
That memory is prescient because Pacino will spend much of his early career addicted to booze and pills, subject to blackouts, memory loss, and self-destructive behaviour. But self-destructive behaviour seems to have run in his family. In another poignant memory, he writes:
I wasn’t aware that my mother was having problems until one day when I was six years old. I was getting ready to go out and play in the streets, sitting in a chair in the kitchen while my mother laced up my little shoes for me and put a sweater on me to keep me warm. I noticed that she was crying, and I wondered what was the matter, but I didn’t understand how to ask her. She was kissing me all over, and right before I left the apartment, she gave me a great big hug. It was unusual, but I was eager to get downstairs and meet up with the other kids, and I gave it no more thought.
We had been outside for about an hour when we saw a commotion in the street. People were running toward my grandparents’ tenement. Someone said to me, “I think it’s your mother.” I didn’t believe it. I thought, How could they say a thing like that? My mother? That’s not true. I started running with them. There was an ambulance in front of the building, and there, coming out the front doors, carried on a stretcher, was my mother. She had attempted suicide.
That attempt failed, but fifteen years later, Rose Pacino would succeed in taking her own life, although to this day, her son has trouble calling it a suicide:
A lot of people want to leave this world behind for one that’s better, and she was in a state where she escaped by taking drugs. It was interpreted by some that she had committed suicide, which she had tried fifteen years earlier. But she left no note this time, nothing. She was just gone. That’s why I always kept a question mark next to her death. When drugs are involved, people often die when they don’t intend to kill themselves. I don’t know that she did. I’d like to give my mother that benefit of the doubt, that dignity, to be fair to her memory.
The book is filled with statements like “and then my father was gone,” “and then she was gone,” and “[a]cting in this play had brought my mother and father back together again, had made me part of something again. I actually was whole. I felt that sensation for the first time in my life. And then it was gone.” Repeatedly, Pacino has something beautiful in his life, something worth living for, and then, in the blink of an eye, it disappears.
Much of the early part of Sonny Boy is devoted to Pacino’s memories of his three closest childhood friends: Petey, Cliffy, and Bruce. Together they roamed their impoverished neighbourhood and got into scrapes and scraps reminiscent of Hollywood’s Bowery Boys films. All three boys would later die from drug overdoses, and Pacino seems to carry all these ghosts in his heart and imagination—his intense drive for success seems at least partially motivated by a desire to compensate for what poverty and despair did to so many of his loved ones.
While Pacino was in junior high, a teacher named Blanche Rothstein, impressed by his acting abilities, helped him enrol in New York’s High School of Performing Arts. There he was able to hone his craft and channel his energies into something constructive. He dropped out of school before he could earn a diploma but almost immediately found professional acting jobs, albeit low-paying ones in small theatres that attracted sparse audiences. These acting jobs paid so poorly that Pacino was forced to take on other work. He worked as a theatre usher. He worked as a busboy. He worked as a messenger boy. He worked as a building super. He worked as a furniture mover.
The early parts of Sonny Boy feel like the most honest parts of the book, perhaps because all of the bad things that happen to a child can reasonably be blamed on the adults in his life, or on the child’s circumstances and his general lack of agency. As Pacino grows into adulthood, the book becomes more opaque. Bad things still happen, but he doesn’t always draw a clear line connecting cause and effect. Often, his setbacks are blamed on some director or producer rather than on his own frequently problematic behaviour.
A representative sentence reads, “Of course, the director hated my guts. He just seemed to have it in for me from the start.” Pacino is able to see how the self-destructive addictions of his mother and his best friends led to their downfalls. But of his own addictions, he writes:
I think drinking saved my life. I was able to self-medicate. It helped me through my pain, and it kept me away from the outpatient clinic at Bellvue [a mental-health facility]. I would drink at night and pop pills the next day to calm down. I was always looking to be calm, because my mind was going wild, and alcohol had a calming effect. If I had cocaine I would probably levitate, so I used alcohol to ease the pain and emptiness and lower my energy. All I know is, it worked for me.
II.
It was Pacino’s good fortune to make several important friendships at a young age. An acting coach named Charlie Laughton (not the British actor nor any relation) spent years encouraging him not to give up when good roles seem to be in short supply. The two men remained friends for the rest of Laughton’s life, which lasted well into the 21st century. A personal manager and film producer named Martin Bregman also became a close friend of and mentor to the young Pacino and helped shepherd him to success in both the theatre and film. Bregman would subsequently produce some of Pacino’s most successful films, including Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Scarface, Sea of Love, and Carlito’s Way. Their personal association lasted until Bregman’s death in 2018, at the age of 92.
Another important friendship arose between Pacino and a young actor named Martin Sheen. They met when they were both taking Laughton’s acting class, and they moved into a small apartment together so they could split the rent. After Sheen found some success, got married, and moved away with his wife, he continued to assist Pacino. At one point, when Sheen won a starring role in an off-Broadway play and Pacino was still struggling to find work, the two men ran into each other at a subway station. “Al,” Sheen said, “would you do me the honour of understudying me in this part that I’m doing?” It was a lifeline for Pacino, who was flailing at the time. Only later did he learn that “the production wasn’t even paying me to be Marty’s understudy in the play—Marty was paying me himself, out of his own salary. He just wanted me to have the money. I wanted to give it back to him, but he wouldn’t take it.”
Eventually, however, Pacino’s persistence paid off and he began to land some meaty theatre roles. In 1969, he won an Obie Award for Best Actor for his performance in a play called The Indian Wants the Bronx (his friend and future Godfather co-star John Cazale won Best Supporting Actor for his role in the same production). The following year, he won a Tony Award for his performance in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? These successes led to him being cast as the male lead in The Panic in Needle Park, a 1971 film directed by photographer Jerry Schatzberg, scripted by Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, and produced by Dunne’s brother Dominick. The film wasn’t a box office success, but it was a critical triumph and nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
This was the film that brought Pacino to the attention of Francis Ford Coppola just as the director was looking for someone to play Michael Corleone in his adaptation of Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestseller, The Godfather. Pacino has quite a bit to say about The Godfather, but curiously, he seems to resent how much of his success he owes to that breakout role. He has almost nothing negative to say about the film, but he doesn’t exactly gush with enthusiasm about it either. Perhaps this is understandable—after all, no artist likes to think that his career peaked at 31.
Pacino’s attitude may also have something to do with the fact that he had little influence on the shape of the film. Later in his career, he would have the clout to select his own directors and demand rewrites, reshoots, and re-edits. But he was really just a hired hand on The Godfather, and the executives at Paramount Pictures did their best to bounce Pacino from the cast and replace him with a more established star like Robert Redford or Jack Nicholson.
Pacino credits Coppola with saving his job. The first scenes Coppola shot were also the first scenes in the film—the wedding of Vito Corelone’s daughter Connie (Talia Shire). Pacino has little to do in these scenes, and the studio chiefs worried that his performance was impassive and dull. When the call came to replace him, Coppola revised his shooting schedule and shot the scene in which Michael murders two men in a Bronx restaurant. It’s one of the highlights of 1970s cinema, and when the Hollywood execs saw the rushes, they dropped their objections.
This is all part of cinematic lore now and it may explain Pacino’s conflicted feelings about the picture. The Godfather is primarily associated with Marlon Brando, Coppola, and Puzo, all of whom won Academy Awards for their work. The sequel brought additional Academy Awards for Coppola (in three categories), Puzo, and Robert De Niro (who was cast as the young Vito Corleone), as well as for composer Nino Roti. But though Pacino was nominated for his performances in both films, he never won an Oscar for playing Michael Corleone.
I get the sense that Pacino wrote Sonny Boy, in part, to emphasise just how much more there has been to his career. I found it odd how few intimate moments he describes during the sections dedicated to The Godfather, especially compared to the scenes from his childhood. He has nothing but nice things to say about Brando and Coppola, but he doesn’t seem to have ever become especially close to either of them. Brando, in particular, seems to have never become anything more than a professional acquaintance. If the two men had any kind of a personal relationship, Pacino doesn’t mention it.
Graham Daseler
Likewise, though he has congenial things to say about the acting of James Caan (Sonny Corleone) and Robert Duvall (Tom Hagen), he appears to have never formed any sort of a personal bond with either man. He does appear to consider Coppola a friend, but they don’t strike me as particularly close and their relationship seems to be fraught with tension. A few months before the film’s official release, Coppola invited Pacino to watch an unfinished cut of The Godfather with him. When the screening was over, Pacino immediately began giving Coppola notes on his own performance as an actor in the film. He recalls:
[Coppola] looked at me with an expression of quasi-disgust. Of course, when I’m looking at an unfinished film, I can’t help seeing things that I might do differently. But you’d think I would understand that it was not my place to say this to the director of the film, who had just spent the last year of his life dangling from the edge of a cliff by his fingernails to get it made. I was insensitive…”
Here and elsewhere in the book, Pacino seems to recognise that his own colossal ego often turns people against him. Later, he notes that, during the making of The Godfather Part II, “The dynamic with Francis on set felt less friendly…” but he can’t figure out why, which is odd, because a page or two earlier he notes that, during the making of that film, “I was very much into alcohol and drugs, getting high and putting myself in a fog. I preferred to be in a state of semiconsciousness.” Maybe Coppola wasn’t thrilled that his leading man was permanently stoned out of his mind. But Pacino lacks the self-awareness to appreciate this:
There was a tension between us at time. Perhaps it was just the element of familiarity and a lack of communication. … I actually reached out to him recently and asked him about that time in our life together during The Godfather: Part II. He couldn’t recall it and couldn’t quite say. But I remember it as a period when we were somewhat distant from each other and I’m very grateful it didn’t last long.
I suspect Coppola remembers the experience quite well, and that his refusal to say anything about it has to do with the fact that Pacino doesn’t take criticism well (he says he never read reviews but quotes the negative ones throughout the book).
Pacino’s blindness to his own faults is one of the book’s recurring motifs. When he and Gene Hackman made Scarecrow (his second collaboration with director Schatzberg), he writes, “Gene and I were worlds apart. … We weren’t fighting at all. There was just an awkwardness between us. I’ll never understand why.” But, on the very same page, he writes:
I got along really well with Gene Hackman’s younger brother, Richard, who had a small role in the film. We were a couple of guys who liked to drink and party. The two of us went carousing around late at night, and I’d show up on set the next morning on two hours’ sleep. My face would be so flabby and swollen from all the drinking that it looked like one of those big beach balls they throw around in Central Park.
Pacino never considers that Hackman’s frostiness may have had something to do with this kind of unprofessional conduct, or his tendency to involve Hackman’s brother in the same behaviour. On the contrary, Pacino likes to think of himself as a consummate professional. And he seems genuinely perplexed that stars like Hackman, Coppola, and Sheen have managed to sustain marriages and sobriety for long stretches of time (Hackman’s two marriages have lasted a combined total of 63 years; Coppola’s only marriage lasted 61 years, until his wife’s death earlier this year; Sheen’s only marriage is in its 63rd year).
“I almost went my whole life without ever seeing The Godfather in its entirety,” Pacino admits. “I don’t know why. … Over the years, of course, I’d catch a part of it here or there on TV. … But then I recently watched The Godfather at a screening for its fiftieth anniversary at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, where a restored print was beautifully projected, with crisp, perfect sound. The whole experience was so uplifting.” That Al Pacino never watched it in its entirety until fifty years after its release is an indication of his ambivalent relationship with the film that made his name.
III.
Perhaps no film actor has ever had an early-career run as successful as Pacino’s. In 1972, he made The Godfather and earned an Academy Award nomination. In 1973, he appeared with Gene Hackman in Scarecrow, which won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The same year, he appeared in Serpico, for which he earned his second Academy Award nomination. In 1974, he appeared in The Godfather Part II, for which he earned his third nomination. And in 1975, he starred in Dog Day Afternoon, for which he earned his fourth nomination. By that point, he had not put a foot wrong. As he recalls in Sonny Boy, “They would have let me play anything. They offered me the role of Han Solo in Star Wars.” Alas, that’s when things began to go wrong.
In 1977, Pacino starred with Marthe Keller in Bobby Deerfield. Critics panned the film and audiences didn’t seem to care for it either. Pacino blames director Sydney Pollack for the film’s failure. In 1979, he appeared in …And Justice for All, which was a box-office hit, got some decent reviews, and earned him another Oscar nomination. It also provided Pacino with one of his signature lines of dialog (“You’re out of order! You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order!”). But Pacino clashed with director Norman Jewison (“he and I did not hit it off”), which left him unsatisfied by the experience.
In 1980, he starred in Cruising, which ran into trouble while it was still in production. Directed by William Friedkin, it tells the story of a cop who goes undercover to catch a serial killer stalking gay men who frequent New York’s leather bars. Protesters objected to the material and picketed the shoot, claiming the film was exploitative and homophobic. The finished film made some money but it was panned by critics and remains controversial to this day (although it has benefitted from a critical reassessment). Pacino hated the film and said so publicly at the time, understandably enraging his director. In his memoir, he repeats that he regrets his involvement, and Friedkin remained bitter about the experience until he died.
In 1982, Pacino starred in Author! Author!, another critical failure. “What’s Pacino doing in this mess?” cried a dismayed Roger Ebert. “What’s happened to his career?” Again, Pacino blames the director: “[T]he film’s director, Arthur Hiller, and I were not what you would call in sync. (You may be sensing a pattern.)”
The title in his filmography that seems to bring Pacino the greatest sense of pride is 1983’s Scarface, a wild remake (or, more accurately, re-imagining) of a 1932 Howard Hawks film of the same name, which starred Paul Muni. This is odd, because at the time of its release, the film was generally derided. When it was previewed in New York for a group of VIPs, several of them, including writers Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving walked out of the screening in disgust. Written by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian De Palma, it tells the story of a Cuban émigré named Tony Montana who builds a massive narcotics empire in Miami. It is essentially a three-hour wallow in excessive cocaine abuse, graphic violence, and incontinent profanity (the word “fuck” is uttered 226 times in the film, mostly by Pacino).
Scarface was only a moderate box-office hit, becoming the sixteenth highest grossing film of 1983, but it left an outsized cultural footprint. Its trashy aesthetic and endlessly quotable script made it a cult favourite and a massive seller when it was first issued in various home-video formats. It has since been officially re-released in theatres on three different occasions. It also had a huge influence on hip-hop and gangster culture—Scarface and Tony Montana are referenced in dozens of rap songs (not to mention Mario van Peebles’s 1991 film New Jack City starring Wesley Snipes and Ice-T), and several rap artists adopted nicknames that pay homage to De Palma’s film.
Artists like Bob Dylan have also referenced Scarface in their lyrics and it has influenced professional wrestling and video gaming. Even real-life criminals developed a particular fondness for the film. Italian mobster Carlo Padovani kept a bust of Tony Montana in his Naples home. Walter Schiavone, another Italian mobster, had a replica of Montana’s Miami mansion built for himself in Naples. Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein set up a money-laundering company called Montana Management.
For better or worse, Scarface is the film most closely associated with Pacino’s name—he made the film his own and he seems to revel in that fact as it has grown in stature with every passing year. “Depending upon how you look at it,” he reflects now, “you could say Scarface was the most successful movie I ever did.” But even now, few film critics would include it on a list of Pacino’s best work—it might not even make lists of Pacino’s five best mob pictures, which now include the first two Godfather films, Carlito’s Way (his second De Palma collaboration), Donnie Brasco, and The Irishman. Still, Pacino seems to want to be remembered for Scarface, a film that he dominated, unlike The Godfather.
IV.
After Scarface, Pacino retreated into a sort of self-imposed exile. He made only one film between 1984 and 1989, the 1985 box office bomb Revolution, directed by Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire). The film cost US$28 million to make and earned less than US$400,000 at the box office. Pacino blames Hudson (naturally) and the studio (Goldcrest Films), which he claims rushed the production schedule in order to get the film into theatres by Christmas.
During this fallow period he entered into a romantic relationship with Diane Keaton, who played his wife in all three Godfather films. She was working steadily at this time, so Pacino felt no pressure to make money. Keaton teased him about his lethargy, calling him “a lazy Eye-talian.” But by 1989, it became clear that he was about to go broke, a situation he blames on the mismanagement of his wealth by his financial advisors. Keaton flew to New York to chew out Pacino’s lawyers and demand that they find him better consultants. She also insisted that he get back to work.
Pacino hadn’t had a hit in so long that film producers were no longer very interested in him. But Keaton went out looking for film projects and found him a script called Sea of Love, written by novelist Richard Price. Another actor had been pencilled into the leading role, but Keaton helped Martin Bregman secure the rights to the screenplay and the film then went into production with Al Pacino in the lead. It was a hit, taking US$111 million on a budget of US$19 million. Thanks to Keaton, Pacino was on his way back.
In 1990, he co-starred in Dick Tracy (as a gangster named Al Caprice, unrecognisable in a full-body prosthetic suit). The role earned him another Oscar nomination (and another loss). The same year, he starred in the third and final instalment of Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, and though many critics were dismissive, it made a profit. In 1991, he made Frankie and Johnny, with his Scarface co-star Michelle Pfeiffer. That too was profitable. And in 1992, he completed his comeback by starring in Scent of a Woman and Glengarry Glen Ross. He received Academy Award nominations for both roles and won his first Oscar (at the ninth attempt) for Scent of a Woman (he began his acceptance speech by joking, “You broke my streak!”). Since then, he has kept busy in cinema, television, and theatre, but he’s had more misses (Gigli, 88 Minutes, Righteous Kill, Manglehorn, The Humbling) than hits (Heat, The Insider, Insomnia, The Irishman).
Pacino as Lowell Bergman in The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999)
Pacino has never married but his romantic entanglements deserve a book of their own. Over the course of his adult life, he has dated some of the most beautiful and talented women in show business: Jill Clayburg (with whom he co-starred in his first TV appearance), Tuesday Weld (his co-star in Author! Author!), Marthe Keller (his co-star in Bobby Deerfield), Diane Keaton (his Godfather co-star), Kathleen Quinlan, Penelope Ann Miller (his co-star in Carlito’s Way), and Beverly D’Angelo. Most of these relationships lasted between four and six years. He has nice things to say about all of these women except D’Angelo, with whom he has two children (he says nothing negative about her, but his inability to say anything nice is noticeable).
Generally, Pacino acknowledges that he was the reason these relationships didn’t work out. Of Clayburgh, he writes, “She wanted to marry me. She wanted to have a baby. … I don’t think I was a good companion to Jill. I was neglectful of her. I drank and drugged, and she didn’t, and she had to deal with me when I did. I took her for granted. But Jill and I had a lot of fun together.” It sounds like Pacino had more fun than Jill did. Of Quinlan, he writes, “My time with Kathleen was the closest I’ve ever come to getting married. But I’ve always shied away from marriage. I guess I didn’t see how it would help anything.” Meanwhile, Pacino has sired four children, the youngest of whom was born last year, when Pacino was 83 (81-year-old Robert De Niro also welcomed the birth of his seventh child last year).
But if Pacino’s personal life has been a bit of a train wreck, his memoir leaves no doubt that acting has been the most important thing in his life. During an interview for Inside the Actors Studio, he was asked by host James Lipton what he thought God would say to him at the Pearly Gates. “I hope,” Pacino replied, “He says rehearsal starts tomorrow at three p.m.”
