“This is what I’m meant to do,” Pacino says of acting. “With this, everything suddenly coheres, and I understand myself.”Credit Photograph by Dan Winters
Nearly fifty years ago, when Al Pacino was at the start of his career,
Marlon Brando gave him two pieces of advice: don’t go to court and
don’t move to Los Angeles. At seventy-four, Pacino has managed to avoid
the courts but not Beverly Hills, where he has taken up reluctant
residence, for more
than a decade, in order to share custody of his now thirteen-year-old
twins, Anton and Olivia, with their mother, the actress Beverly
D’Angelo. (Pacino, who has never married, also has a
twenty-four-year-old daughter, Julie Marie, an aspiring writer and
filmmaker.) Every half hour or so, an open-topped tour bus crawls its
way along the wide, manicured boulevard where Pacino holes up for most
of the year, with a cargo of rubbernecking out-of-towners, cameras at
the ready. Inevitably, they stop in front of his rented house, which,
like the actor, is elegantly dishevelled. Green canvas has been woven
through the bars of the long iron fence to hide the place from street
level; low-hanging Indian laurel trees seal off any visible signs of
life from above. Nonetheless, the buses stop, the guides burble, and the
tourists crane for a sign of the actor or his children. On my second
day with Pacino, I happened to be parked in front of his house as a tour
bus rolled up. The guide leaned down. “You were here yesterday,” he
said. “You know Al?” I nodded. Above me, camera shutters clattered.
At that moment, Pacino was reclining in a deck chair at the far end of a wide lawn behind the house, doing business on a cell phone.
Beyond him was a fenced-off swimming pool, and beyond that was what he
calls “the bunker” (as in “I hunker in the bunker”), a drab beige
outbuilding, where he sometimes goes to incubate his roles. Pacino was
dressed for the bright day in his usual sombre getup: black jacket,
shirt, slacks, and shoes, with a long gray cravat loosely knotted at the
chest. He keeps a well-pressed assortment of these dark camouflage
outfits on a wardrobe rack in the alcove off his living room, alongside
his infrequently used barbells and a folded-up running machine. His
comfortable house, with its absence of texture, is remarkable for its
indifference to externals: no paintings, no designer furniture or
fripperies. Pacino’s focus, the house makes clear, is resolutely inward.
As
an actor, Pacino has always been unafraid to do what he needs to in
order to be in the moment; he trusts his instincts and explodes with
whatever feelings come up. Performing, for him, is not so much a
profession as a destiny. “This is what I’m meant to do,” he told me.
“It’s the cog in my life. With this, everything suddenly coheres. And I
understand myself in that way.” Pacino has given complex shape to some
of his era’s most memorable creations: Michael Corleone, the college boy
turned Mafioso, in “The Godfather” trilogy (1972-90); Frank Serpico,
the police whistle-blower, in “Serpico” (1973); Tony Montana, the Cuban
drug lord, in “Scarface” (1983); the hapless thief Teach, in “American
Buffalo” (1983); Sonny Wortzik, the would-be bank robber, in “Dog Day
Afternoon” (1975); the gangster Big Boy Caprice, in “Dick Tracy” (1990);
Ricky Roma, the smooth-talking salesman, in “Glengarry Glen Ross”
(1992); and Roy Cohn, the closeted lawyer, in the HBO version of Tony
Kushner’s “Angels in America” (2003)—to name just a few of the more than
a hundred roles he has taken onscreen and onstage. In recent years, he
has painted brilliant, eerie film portraits of such obsessives as the
euthanasia activist Jack Kevorkian, in Barry Levinson’s HBO movie “You
Don’t Know Jack,” and the eponymous swami of rock and roll, in David
Mamet’s HBO film “Phil Spector.” Pacino regrets that many of his
Hollywood movies of the past decade (“Righteous Kill,” “The Son of No
One,” “88 Minutes,” “Jack and Jill”) have been business chores, taken on
for primarily financial reasons. “If you don’t have that alacrity of
spirit, then you have to check yourself—because where’s the pony in all
this horseshit?” he said. “I worked for United Parcels once, and I don’t
want to have that feeling with my own craft—that it’s just a job.”
Because
of the protean nature of his attack, Pacino has often been compared to
Brando, another truth-seeking force of nature. When Pacino was thirteen
and performing in a school play, an adaptation of “Home
Sweet Homicide,” he already identified so strongly with his role that
when his character was supposed to get sick onstage he became nauseated.
(“Somebody came up and said to my mother, ‘Here’s the next Brando.’ I
said, ‘Who’s Brando?’ ” Pacino recalled.) But between Brando and Pacino
there is this crucial difference: Brando, who, over time, became
reclusive and indifferent to acting, disappeared into his gift; Pacino
has survived his—and is still working to refine it. “I believe I have
not reached my stride, which is why I persist,” he told me in an e-mail.
“The day I turn to you and say, ‘John, what I just did in this role was
a real winner,’ I hope you’ll have the courage and decency to throw a
wreath around my head, and then so very quietly and compassionately
shoot me.”
Pacino has three films
awaiting release in the next year: Barry Levinson’s “The Humbling,” in
which he plays an aging actor who has lost his magic; David Gordon
Green’s “Manglehorn,” a film about an eccentric small-town locksmith; and Dan Fogelman’s “Danny Collins,” an amiable redemptive fable about a slick pop star who wants to turn his art
and his lush life around. At seventy-four, Pacino sometimes asks
himself, “When am I just gonna sit back and smell the golf balls?” But,
with two new movies waiting in the wings (Martin Scorsese’s “The
Irishman,” about the man who supposedly killed Jimmy Hoffa, and a Brian
De Palma bio-pic about Joe Paterno), and a David Mamet play, “China
Doll,” in the works for Broadway in 2015, the answer is not soon.
Most
of Pacino’s house has been ceded to his kids. The den is a sort of Camp
Pacino, overflowing with toys: a pinball machine, a drum kit, electric
guitars, dolls, a mound of games, balls, rackets, and swimming gear
crammed into baskets against the back wall. A low table holds a
sprawling Lego construction in progress. Outside, a punching bag hangs
incongruously beside the patio barbecue. (It’s there for Pacino’s son;
when I asked Pacino if he used it, he said, “Like Oscar Wilde, whenever I
get the urge to exercise I lie down until it passes.”) Pacino usually
spends weekends with the twins, because “their mother knows I’m a
slacker at the homework.”
At one point, Olivia came in to ask a favor:
“It’s the Singularity—the machines are taking over!”Buy or license » Olivia: Daddy, I really want to see the boy next door. He usually comes over by the weekend.
Pacino: Does he really? But I don’t even know what his name is. What’s his name?
Olivia: I forgot. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him.
Pacino: Do you want to go over and say— What do you want me to do? Me? I’m the— What am I, the go-between?
Olivia: No. Just see if Jared [Pacino’s weekend assistant] can call.
Pacino:
But Jared’s not here. He could do it tomorrow, when he comes in. Do you
want Mike [Pacino’s regular assistant] to do it now? Mike will do it.
Olivia: I don’t think Mike knows anybody there.
Pacino: Jared knows someone there? Ask Mike if he could just find out.
Pacino’s
father left him and his mother when he was two, and he carries the
shadow of that abandonment with him. “It’s the missing link, so to
speak,” he said. “Having children has helped a lot. I consciously knew
that I didn’t want to be like my dad. I wanted to be there. I have three
children. I’m responsible to them. I’m a part of their life. When I’m
not, it’s upsetting to me and to them. So that’s part of the gestalt.
And I get a lot from it. It takes you out of yourself. When I do a
movie, and I come back, I’m stunned for the first twenty minutes. These
people are asking me to do things for them? Huh? I’m not being waited on? Wait a minute. Uh-oh, it’s about them! That action satisfies. I like it.”
He
pointed out a watercolor beside the fireplace. “My son painted this
when he was four. ‘New York in the Fall,’ ” he said, then steered me
back into the living room and deposited me on a sofa to watch “Wilde
Salomé,” a docudrama he directed, starred in, and largely bankrolled,
which premières this month. The film represents Pacino’s eight-year
attempt to “inhale” Oscar Wilde by chronicling the mounting of a 2006
Los Angeles production of Wilde’s 1891 tragedy, in which he was Herod to
Jessica Chastain’s Salomé. (“Wilde Salomé” will be released in tandem
with a film of the play itself.) Pacino first encountered “Salomé” in
London in 1989, without realizing that it was written by Wilde. “Who
wrote this? I’d like to know this person,” he recalled thinking. “I just
felt a connection. A kindred spirit. I think it was a mischievousness, a
subversiveness.” Pacino relates to Wilde as an outsider. “I feel like
an outsider who got on the inside, so I’m inside out, if you know what I
mean. Or outside in,” he said.
Like “Looking for Richard,”
Pacino’s 1996 movie about Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” “Wilde Salomé” is
a dramatic mosaic that jumps from historical facts to performance to
interview to enactment. Pacino is the director yelling at the crew to
hurry up; he’s the lubricious Herod eying his gorgeous daughter; he’s
the interviewer prodding Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, Gore Vidal, and
Bono to talk about Wilde; he’s the professor offering tidbits of
Wildeana; and he’s the anthropologist trudging through the desert with
kaffiyeh and camel. At one point, Pacino, with a carnation and a floppy
handkerchief in his jacket pocket, even pops up as Wilde himself.
Part
of Pacino’s fervor for Wilde comes from a desire to claim the writer’s
intelligence and eloquence. “I’m quite timid when it comes to
challenging the status quo,” he said. “Oscar had the brains to back it
up.” Pacino, whose formal education ended in tenth grade, grappled for
years with a sense of intellectual inadequacy. Early in his career,
after a breakthrough performance in Israel Horovitz’s 1968 play “The
Indian Wants the Bronx,” Pacino appeared on “The Merv Griffin Show,”
and, in front of a television audience of millions, he froze. “He just
couldn’t do it,” Horovitz recalled. “He felt he had nothing to say. He
was humiliated by his own presence. He wasn’t the character he was
playing—he was Al.” Pacino’s devotion to acting is, in a way, a defense
against that self-doubt. Having a script to work from gives him, he
said, a kind of license. “I can talk, I can speak, I have something to say,”
he explained. “You don’t need a college education. All the things that
you were inhibited to talk about and understand—they can come out in the
play. The language of great writing frees you of yourself.” Most
actors of Pacino’s stature—Brando, Jack Lemmon, Dustin Hoffman, Robert
De Niro—began in theatre and rarely returned. Pacino, however, craves
the derring-do of working in front of a live audience, an activity he
compares to tightrope walking. Stage acting, he likes to say, quoting
the aerialist Karl Wallenda, is life “on the wire—the rest is just
waiting.” Onstage, in the zone, he told me, “you’re up in the sky with
the theatre gods—love it, love it, love it.” As a list of some of
Pacino’s more esoteric stage work demonstrates—Eugene O’Neill’s
“Hughie,” Bertolt Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,”
Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and “The Merchant of Venice”—the theatre is
where he goes to challenge himself and to think. “There are more demands
put on you when it is on the stage,” he said.
To Pacino, there
is no such thing as a fourth wall. “The audience is another character in
the play,” he said. “They become part of the event. If they sneeze or
talk back to the stage, you make it part of what you’re doing.” Once,
when he was performing “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,” the first
play in David Rabe’s Vietnam trilogy, in Boston, in 1972, Pacino made a
strong connection with a pair of penetrating eyes in the audience. “I
remember feeling a focus I never experienced before—intense, so riveting
that I directed my performance to that space,” he said. “I found at
curtain call for the first time that I needed to find out who belonged
to those eyes. So, as we were bowing, I looked over to the space where I
believed the look was coming from and there it was, two seeing-eye dogs
still looking at me. They must have found the curtain call as engaging
as the performance.”
Acting, according to Pacino, is about
“getting into a state that brings about freedom and expression and the
unconscious.” Mamet compares Pacino’s excavations of his characters to
the way Louis Armstrong played jazz: “He’s incapable of doing it the
same way twice.” While Pacino was shooting his last scene for the movie
“Devil’s Advocate” (1997), in which he played Satan, for instance, he
suddenly broke off from the script to launch into a rendition of “It
Happened in Monterey.” “It’s just absolutely out there, surreal and
brilliant,” the actress Helen Mirren, whose husband, Taylor Hackford,
directed the film, said. In the final movie, Pacino lip-synchs to Frank
Sinatra’s version of the song; according to Mirren, the studio had to
pay “a huge sum for the rights, but it was worth it.” “It’s from the We Experience Parenthood More Fully Than You collection.”Buy or license » Pacino
sometimes develops his characters by observing others. When he was
working on his performance in “The Indian Wants the Bronx,” he would
walk for hours with Horovitz. “What he was doing was finding a character
in life,” Horovitz told me. “He’d spot a guy on the street and go,
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ We’d follow the person for hours, just to observe
the walk, the posture. And the costume was important, too. He had to
find the costume, rehearse in the costume, live in the costume.”
“Some actors play characters. Al Pacino becomes them,”
Lee Strasberg, the longtime director of the Actors Studio, said. “He
assumes their identity so completely that he continues to live a role
long after a play or movie is over.” Once, when Pacino was playing
Richard III in Boston, Jacqueline Kennedy came backstage to greet him.
“I didn’t even get up,” he said. “I was so into it that night that I
continued to be the King. I can almost not forgive myself for that.”
When
preparing for a role, Pacino has a tendency to circle the airport
before arriving at his destination. “I’m a slow learner,” he said. “I
don’t believe in memorizing lines. That’s not how I come upon a role. My
thing is eventually coming to the words, making the words part of you,
so that they’re an extension of your emotional state.” Pacino’s
“nibbling away at a character,” according to Barry Levinson, is a subtle
process. After the first few readings of the script for “You Don’t Know
Jack,” Levinson recalls wondering “when Kevorkian will show up.” “I
remember we were in wardrobe. Al had his hair done, and his suit. We
were talking and, all of a sudden, I could sense that Kevorkian was
coming alive,” he said, adding, “Once he latches on, then he’s off to
the races.” At the finale of “You Don’t Know Jack,” after Kevorkian has
unsuccessfully defended himself in court, the judge looks at him and
asks if he wants to take the stand. Pacino doesn’t answer at first. “It
takes literally a minute,” Levinson said. “He’s trying to decide if the
defense rests. It’s a brilliant moment. No words—it’s a look, a glance,
small things that really inform the character.”
Over the years,
there have been rumblings about Pacino’s overacting. He can certainly
roar; he can pound the furniture; he can go big with the facial
expressions; he has made some dud movies. But the drama, for Pacino, is
almost always inherent in the character he’s hoping to convey. His
portrayal of the blind Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in “Scent of a
Woman” (1992), for instance, was considered hammy by some, but, in
Pacino’s thinking, the character was a lunatic—a suicidal, narcissistic
man who drew attention to himself through his affectation of swagger—and
he played him that way. “I paint the way I see it, and some of the
colors are a little broader and a little bolder than others,” he said,
adding, “Sometimes you take it to the limit, sometimes you may go a
little overboard, but that’s all part of a vision. I say, go with the
glow. If an effort is being made to produce something that has appetite
and passion and isn’t done just to get the golden cup, it isn’t a
fucking waste. Yes, there are flaws, but in them are things you’ll
remember.”
Pacino protects his talent by leaving it alone, which accounts for his vaunted moodiness. “There
are various superstitions connected with reaching his center, and he
doesn’t want to discuss them ever,” Mike Nichols, who directed Pacino in
“Angels in America,” said. “He’s consulting somewhere else. And the
somewhere else does not have to do with words.” Pacino almost never
talks shop. When he was at the Actors Studio, in the late sixties,
whenever Strasberg gave him notes, he said, “I would actually count
numbers in my head not to hear what he was saying. I didn’t want to
know. I thought it would fuck up what I was doing, where I was going
with my own ideas.”
Even Pacino’s speech patterns, which forge a
kind of evasive switchback trail up a mountain of thought, serve as a
defense against too much parsing of his interior. “Al is dedicated,
passionately, to inarticulateness,” Nichols said, pointing out that in
conversation Pacino has no “chitchat.” Playing dead in social situations
is his instinctive strategy. “He was so sensitive that he was
insensitive to his surroundings,” Diane Keaton, with whom Pacino had an
on-again-off-again relationship in the seventies and eighties, wrote in
her memoir “Then Again.” “Sometimes I swear Al must have been raised by
wolves. There were normal things he had no acquaintance with, like the
whole idea of enjoying a meal in the company of others. He was more at
home eating alone standing up. He did not relate to tables or the
conversations people had at them.”
Pacino refers to acting as
“close to magic.” To invoke that spell, he observes many rituals, which
sometimes include shaking hands with everyone on a film set before
shooting a scene, and heading off for a walk before going onstage. “The
calm before the storm—only sometimes the calm becomes the storm,” he
explained. In 2012, when he was appearing in Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen
Ross” on Broadway, Pacino was skulking around midtown in a hooded coat
when a parking attendant accosted him. “ ‘You! Get out! What are you
doing here?’ ” Pacino recalled him shouting. He added, “Oh, it felt so
good.”
While working on his first production of “Richard III,” in
1973, at the Church of the Covenant, in Boston, Pacino and his
assistant developed a pre-show routine for launching him into the role
of the anarchic, manipulative “lump of foul deformity” who would be
king. Pacino’s dressing room was the church rectory. “She’d peek through
the door and say, ‘Half hour,’ then, ‘Fifteen minutes.’ She’d come back
again and say, ‘Five minutes.’ I would say, ‘Fuck off,’ each time,”
Pacino told me. “She’d say, ‘The audience is out there waiting for you.’
And I’d say, ‘Fuck off!’ She’d say, ‘I’m coming to get you.’ She’d grab
at me, and she’d throw me out of the dressing room. I guess it was the
right spirit, because it worked. They called me out six times after I
bowed.” After the show, he added, “I would bawl my eyes out. I roused so
many things in myself.”
Pacino’s allegiance to
the stage, his compulsion to connect with a live audience, is due,
perhaps, to a need to re-create his relationship with the person he
calls his first and “indeed my best audience,” his mother, Rose. To be
seen and to be accepted was the promise behind his early performances.
The theatrical interaction gives him, he said, “a sense of being at
home, together again.”
Pacino’s father, Salvatore, was eighteen
when Alfredo was born, in East Harlem, in 1940, and twenty when he left.
He paid a few memorable visits, twice going to see his son perform in
high-school plays, but Pacino saw very little of him, even after he had
become a star. By then, Salvatore, who married five times and for
decades worked as an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life, owned
Pacino’s Lounge, a restaurant and bar in Covina, California, where he
frequently joined the band to sing, play the maracas, and shake his
booty. “When a friend met my dad, he looked at him and said, ‘There it
is with you, Al. I see it. The survivor,’ ” Pacino said. “I got that
from my dad.” “Hey, you forgot the GoPro.”Buy or license » Rose,
according to Pacino, was a reader who had “a sensitivity and a
connection to the theatre.” She took Pacino to see Tennessee Williams’s
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway. She was playful, with a good sense
of humor, but also volatile and reclusive. She often refused to leave
her room when company came over. “She reminded me of a Tennessee
Williams character. She would have been a really good Laura, also a good
Amanda. She had both,” Pacino said, referring to Williams’s play “The
Glass Menagerie.” In other words, she was a troubled, fragile,
controlling, somewhat hysterical soul, who fought a losing battle
against her own desperation. Despite the family’s meagre income, Rose
scraped together enough to pay for visits to a psychiatrist. To treat
her chronic depression, she resorted to electric-shock therapy.
Eventually, she became addicted to barbiturates, which may have been the
cause of her death, at forty-three, in 1962. The stain of her possible
suicide hangs over Pacino’s memory of Rose. “Poverty took her down,” he
said. Not long before she died, Pacino recalls rushing to a casting
session for Elia Kazan’s “America America.” “I had one of the few
fantasies I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. “I would do well, my
mother would be O.K. with it all, and I could say, ‘Mom, we got it.
We’re gonna make some money. It’s gonna be O.K.’ ” As it happened,
Pacino arrived late and missed the audition. After
Salvatore left, Rose and Sonny (as Pacino was known throughout his
childhood) moved in with her parents, James Gerardi, a plasterer who was
an illegal immigrant from Corleone, Sicily, and his wife, Kate. In
their cramped three-room apartment in the South Bronx, which sometimes
housed as many as seven people, Pacino never had a space of his own. (“I
remember years of sleeping between my grandmother and grandfather,” he
said.) At the same time, he was an only child, often left to his own
devices. “I was always sort of building stories, creating stories,” he
said. “It was a way of filling up the loneliness.”
Storytelling
ran in the family. In warm weather, Pacino’s grandfather, with whom
Pacino had what he calls “one of the great relationships of my life,”
would sit with him on the tar roof of their tenement and spin tales
about his rough Dickensian youth in turn-of-the-century New York. “He
got the shit kicked out of him by cops with helmets and big clubs—‘You
little wop! Get over here, you stinking Guinea!’ ” Pacino said. “He’d
talk about running away from home, living off the farms, how he would
steal milk. He just loved talking to me, like we were on some little
rowboat.” The roof, Pacino added, “was our terrace. There was this
cacophony of sound—the Poles, the Jews, the Irish, the German, the
Spanish. This definitive melting pot is what I came from. In some Eugene
O’Neill plays, you hear the same thing.”
Among many odd jobs,
Rose worked as a cinema usherette, and when Pacino was three or four she
began to take him to the movies. “The next day, I would act out all the
parts,” he said. “I think that’s how it started.” Pacino was often
coaxed into performing scenes for his extended family, which included a
deaf aunt. His party piece was an imitation of Ray Milland in “The Lost
Weekend,” playing an alcoholic writer desperate for a drink. Pacino
would open cupboards and doors, pretending to search for a hidden stash
of booze. “I never understood why they were laughing, because I didn’t
think it was funny,” he said. “But I knew it produced laughs.”
On
Bryant Avenue in the forties and fifties, people escaped their small,
hot apartments to sit on stoops or hang out under street lamps to roll
dice or play poker. To disarm bullies and find friends, Pacino used the
same strategy on the street that he’d used at home: he performed and
enlisted others to perform with him, earning the nickname “the Actor.”
“We’d act out parts from joke books and comic books,” he told me. “Kids
make videos today, but it was kind of an unusual thing then to get
street urchins to join you in acting out comics. Of course, it never got
off the ground; there’s a comedy in there somewhere.” “He was always
full of drama,” said his neighbor Ken Lipper, who would later become the
deputy mayor of New York and a producer and screenwriter of “City Hall”
(1996), in which Pacino starred. “He loved to take on different
personae. He used to go to 174th Street and pretend he was a blind
child.” Pacino’s bravado and good looks got him noticed. “The girls in
the neighborhood would say, ‘Sonny Pacino, the lover bambino.’ The boys
would say, ‘Sonny Pacino, the bastard bambino,’ ” Pacino told me. “It
started early.”
Pacino was smoking at nine, chewing tobacco at
ten, and drinking hard liquor at thirteen. He walked the edges of
rooftops and jumped between tenement buildings. His favorite place was
“the Dutchies,” a swampy labyrinth on the Bronx River, where truant kids
hid in high marsh grasses. Pacino played third base for the Police
Athletic League team, the Red Wings, which became a “quasi street gang,”
with Al as its de-facto leader. In black wool jackets with a red stripe
down the sleeve, the Red Wings patrolled their turf and protected it
from roaming invaders, like the Young Sinners and the Fordham Baldies.
Once, when they were twelve and sitting on the steps of a tenement after
finishing a game of stickball, Lipper said, “some guy came over who was
thirtyish and started menacing us. Al got up and whacked him with the
stick.” Pacino’s wild crew, “tough kids with high I.Q.s and tragic
endings,” became a template on which he modelled many of his memorable
characters. “These people were a springboard for my profession,” he
said. “They were part of what I consider the best time in my life.”
Pacino
was less popular with the authority figures around him. “I wasn’t out
of control, but I was close,” he said. “My mother had to come to school
to talk to the teachers. Their conclusion? That I needed a dad.” When
Pacino’s junior-high-school drama teacher, Blanche Rothstein, climbed
the five flights of stairs to talk to his grandmother about his acting
skills, it was, he said, “the first time I ever had encouragement.” He
went on, “The world we came from, the encouragement just wasn’t there.
We weren’t seen. Or we weren’t regarded. Do you think ever, once in my
life, my mother or any adult ever said, ‘How was school today?’ Never!
It was unheard of.” Nonetheless, Ms. Rothstein spotted a spark when
Pacino read Bible passages in school assembly—“I didn’t know what I was
talking about, but I felt it,” he said—and she cast him in school plays.
Thanks to his talent, at the end of junior high Pacino was voted “most
likely to succeed.” Pacino
was accepted into Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts, which
meant that his South Bronx street life was more or less a thing of the
past. “All that remained was acting,” he said. His stay at the school,
however, was a short one. “You gotta be kidding,” he told his Spanish
teacher, when he discovered that the class was conducted entirely in
Spanish. And he found the Stanislavsky method boring. “What does a kid
who was thirteen, fourteen know about Stanislavsky?” he said. “All I
knew was you sing, you dance, you have fun, you imitate. Now I was
looking at my navel twenty-four-seven. It took me I don’t know how many
years to get over that.” By his own admission, Pacino was a “dunderhead”
at academic work, and by the time he dropped out of school, at sixteen,
to support his mother, he was ready to go. Rose, who had at first
approved of his ambition, now saw it as foolhardy. “Acting isn’t for our
kind of people,” she told him. “Poor people don’t go into this.” Pacino
said, “I didn’t know what she was talking about. On an unconscious
level I did, but it didn’t mean anything to me. I’m a survivor.
Survivors only hear what they want to hear.”
Between odd jobs,
Pacino attended auditions, where he soon learned that, as an
Italian-American of a certain class and demeanor, he didn’t “look right”
for most parts. His instinct was to bide his time. “I knew, when the
opportunity came, all I’d have to do is be there,” he said. But his
mother’s death, when he was twenty-one, sent him into a tailspin. Within
a year, his grandfather, too, was dead. Pacino had buried the two
people to whom he was closest. “And I had no father,” he said. “I think
that was my darkest period. I felt lost.” “Don’t—they’ll just spend it on drugs.”Buy or license »
On
Pacino’s living-room mantelpiece is a small moody photograph of him in
profile in his early twenties, in an Off-Off Broadway production of
August Strindberg’s play “Creditors.” The image marks the seminal
moment, he said, “when I knew that nothing mattered except that I became
at one with the play.” “Creditors,” a tragicomedy about a credulous
young artist whose mind is poisoned against his wife by her bilious
ex-husband, was directed by Charlie Laughton, an actor turned acting
teacher at the Herbert Berghof Studio, whom Pacino first met in a
Village bar when he was seventeen. Laughton, who’d also had a
hardscrabble early life, recognized both Pacino’s talent and his
difficult circumstances. Over time, he became Pacino’s mentor, his
sidekick, his drinking buddy, his dramaturge, and, ultimately, his
business partner. Laughton also introduced the teen-age Pacino to the
works of Joyce and Rimbaud. “He would read them, and then I would read
them myself,” Pacino told me. In those knockabout years, he added, “I
dealt with whatever was bothering me through reading. You could not find
me without a book.”
Still, in the early days of rehearsing
“Creditors” Pacino, surrounded by classically trained actors, panicked
and wanted to quit the show. Laughton sat him down and went through the
script with him until he fully understood what was going on. Pacino had
been spooked in that way before, in his Off-Off Broadway début, in a
production of William Saroyan’s “Hello Out There,” which grew out of
Laughton’s classes. Pacino’s first line got a laugh, but he didn’t
understand the joke. In the alley, during intermission, he burst into
tears and didn’t want to continue. Laughton talked him through it. “It
was a very important moment for me,” Pacino recalled. “I went back in
there and finished the run.”
Laughton, who was for years
wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis and who died in 2013, at the
age of eighty-four, remained an emotional bulwark for Pacino until the
end. Pacino visited him in his last days, at a hospital in Santa Monica,
and they got to talking about the time that Pacino was taking
Laughton’s class at the Berghof Studio and performed a scene from
Reginald Rose’s “Crime in the Streets” in front of Berghof and the rest
of the school. After he finished, he said, “Berghof got up there and
started to put me down. He started screaming at me, ‘How dare you!’ He
was absolutely flipping out.” Pacino asked Laughton, “What was going
on?” “A new era,” Laughton said. “He saw a new era.”
On
January 17, 1967, for his first scene at the Actors Studio, Pacino
presented a monologue from Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” which
morphed into a soliloquy from “Hamlet.” It was risky, but, as Pacino
said, “It’s a risk not to take risks.” Breaking a long-standing
Studio tradition, the audience of actors applauded his performance. Lee
Strasberg then asked Pacino to play O’Neill’s character, Hickey, as
Hamlet, and Hamlet as Hickey. Afterward, he addressed Pacino. “The
courage you have shown today is rarer than talent,” he said. Pacino had
broken through. “I was now an actor,” he said. “I had an identity.”
He
spent much of the next year in Boston doing plays (Clifford Odets’s
“Awake and Sing!,” Jean-Claude van Itallie’s “America, Hurrah”), in
which, he said, “I played notes that fell flat and I didn’t connect.”
But when Israel Horovitz delivered his one-act “The Indian Wants the
Bronx” to Pacino, in a messy basement room in a building on West
Sixty-eighth Street, where he was earning fourteen dollars a week as a
superintendent, Pacino found the perfect vehicle—a script about two
taunting teen-age louts in the Bronx who take out their frustrations on
an Indian man at a bus stop.
Over
the next months, Pacino and Horovitz performed the play in and out of
town to raise interest in a production. But when a producer was
eventually found she had her own ideas about casting. “On audition day,
she brought in the actor she wanted: blond, blue-eyed, tall,
untalented,” Horovitz wrote in a memoir. “I said no, absolutely no. She
said, fine, O.K., she wouldn’t produce the play. I said, ‘Let both
actors audition.’ ” Pacino was furious with Horovitz for putting him in
this position; since he didn’t belong to Actors’ Equity, he was forced
to attend an open call. “It seemed like every young, non-union actor in
New York City showed up that day,” Horovitz recalled. When it was
Pacino’s turn, he came out singing, then crossed to downstage center and
looked directly at the producer:
Hey, Pussyface, can you hear us?
Can you hear your babies singin’ to ya?
“Startled and terrified,” according to Horovitz, she agreed to cast Pacino.
“The
Indian Wants the Bronx” opened at the Astor Place Theatre, on January
17, 1968. Of all the débuts I attended in more than fifty years as a
theatre critic, Pacino’s was the most sensational: immediate, arresting,
and inexplicable. “I saw an actor up there with a shaking jaw, who was
on the verge of tears,” Horovitz recalled. “The circumstance of the play
was bringing him to a deep place of pain. And the audience connected to
this terrible sense of humiliation, of unworthiness.” Pacino won an
Obie for Best Actor, and a Tony the following year, for his performance
in Don Petersen’s “Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?”
“All
I could see was Al Pacino’s face in that camera. I couldn’t get him out
of my head,” said Francis Ford Coppola, who nearly got fired from “The
Godfather” (1972) for insisting that Pacino play Michael Corleone, the
educated youngest son of Don Corleone, the Mafia kingpin. The studio
lobbied for such bright box-office names as Robert Redford, Warren
Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Ryan O’Neal. But Mario Puzo, who wrote “The
Godfather” and adapted it for the screen, came to Coppola’s defense and
gave him a letter to be used at his discretion. “Above all, Pacino had
to be in the film,” he said.
On the day of his first screen test,
however, Pacino was hung over: he didn’t know his lines, and he
ad-libbed the scene. Puzo felt that Pacino “was terrible. Jimmy Caan had
done it ten times better.” Puzo went over to Coppola. “Give me my
letter back,” he said. “Wait a while,” Coppola said. Pacino tested three
times for the role. The back-and-forth agitated him to such a degree
that he finally refused to take Coppola’s calls and made the actress
Jill Clayburgh, his girlfriend at the time, speak for him. “ ‘Francis,
you’re making him crazy. He doesn’t want to be where he’s not wanted,’ ”
Pacino recalls her saying.
When Pacino was finally offered the
part, he almost couldn’t take it. A few months earlier, he’d signed on
for an adaptation of the Jimmy Breslin book “The Gang That Couldn’t
Shoot Straight,” and M-G-M and the producer, Irwin Winkler, refused to
release him. Winkler and Horovitz were sharing a house on Fire Island,
and Pacino begged the playwright to intercede on his behalf. “This was
the door opening, and they wouldn’t let him out of his contract,”
Horovitz recalled. “I went crazy with Irwin, and he said, ‘You find me a
young Italian actor that’s as good as Pacino, and I’ll let him out.’ ”
Horovitz took Winkler to see a performance by a young unknown named
Robert De Niro. “He took De Niro, and he got two options on Pacino and
two on De Niro,” Horovitz said.
After Pacino got the “Godfather”
role (for which he was paid a flat fee of thirty-five thousand dollars),
he walked from his apartment, on Ninetieth Street and Broadway, to the
Village and back, thinking about how he’d play it. “I didn’t see Michael
as a gangster,” he said. “I saw his struggle as something that was
connected to his intelligence, that innate sense of what’s around and
being able to adjust to things.” He added, “The power of the character
was in his enigmatic quality. And I thought, Well, how do you get to
that? I think you wear it inside yourself, and you find a way to avoid,
as much as you can, the obvious.” However, after his first week of
avoiding the obvious, according to Pacino, “they wanted me fired—they
didn’t see what I was doing. Luckily for me, the Sollozzo scene”—in
which Michael earns his Mafia spurs by executing two men in a Bronx
restaurant—“was the next day. When they saw that scene, they kept me.” Buy or license » Pacino’s
performance in “The Godfather” put him at the center of one of the
great cinematic sagas of the century and on a first-name basis with the
world. He was showered with accolades and offers. (Coppola asked him to
star in “Apocalypse Now,” but he declined. “You know, sometimes you look
into the abyss?” Pacino said. “I’m, like, this is the abyss. I’m not
gonna go there.” He also turned down “Star Wars,” “Die Hard,” and
“Pretty Woman.”) But perhaps the most satisfying response came from
Puzo, who wrote, “It was, in my eyes, a perfect performance, a work of
art. I was so happy . . . I ate crow like it was my favorite Chinese
food.”
Pacino’s other great early successes—“Serpico,” “The
Godfather, Part II,” and “Dog Day Afternoon”—only added to his momentum.
But, of all his performances in those years, the sleeper was his
embodiment of the garish, vulgar, sensationally violent Tony Montana, an
impoverished Cuban refugee who becomes the most powerful drug
trafficker in Miami, in “Scarface.” The role was dismissed as “macho
primitivism” at the time, but, over the years, it has emerged as a
challenger to Michael Corleone as Pacino’s most popular creation. The
director, Brian De Palma, designed “Scarface” as a kind of hyperbolic
pageant. “The picture had a fire to it,” Pacino said, in “Al Pacino: In
Conversation with Lawrence Grobel.” “The violence blown up, the language
blown up. The spirit of it was Brechtian, operatic.” To play Montana,
Pacino drew inspiration from the swagger of the Panamanian boxer Roberto
Duran and from Meryl Streep’s committed rendering of the traumatized
Polish immigrant Sophie, in “Sophie’s Choice.” As an actor, Pacino said,
“you’re always looking for that thing that’s going on besides the
words.” In “Scarface,” he connected with Montana’s raging ambition and
the rebelliousness in his epigrammatic lines: “All I have in the world
is my balls and my word, and I don’t break them for no one”; “You know
what capitalism is? Getting fucked!”; “You wanna play rough? O.K. Say
hello to my little friend!”
In
the twenty years following the release of “The Godfather,” Pacino made
seventeen films and was nominated for an Academy Award six times. (He
finally received one, in 1993, for his performance in “Scent of a
Woman.”) But he was discombobulated by the distractions of his success.
“I felt like the fighter that was in Round 8, exhausted in the corner,
they’re pouring water over my head and rubbing Vaseline on my face, then
ding went the bell, and I was back out there in another film,”
he recalled. “It was a whirlwind.” Pacino disappeared into work, and,
after hours, into a bottle. “I don’t remember much of the seventies,” he
said. “All that stuff—the explosiveness of my life change. It would be
almost fair to say I wasn’t really there. It was too much for anyone to
handle.” Eventually, Laughton called Pacino on his alcohol abuse, which
had been a constant since he was a teen-ager. He stopped drinking in
1977.
During his first year of sobriety, a time of great stress,
Pacino made “Bobby Deerfield,” a plodding Sydney Pollack melodrama, in
which he played a celebrity race-car driver, who hides his vulnerability
behind sunglasses and a carapace of toughness. His next movie,
“Cruising” (1980), William Friedkin’s thriller about a serial killer who
targets gay men—which sparked protests in the gay community—was “a
terrible experience” for Pacino as well as for the critics. “Author!
Author!” (1982), which was written by Horovitz, was also a bust.
“Scarface” came out to mixed reviews, and was followed by “Revolution”
(1985), in which Pacino played a Scottish fur trapper with a Bronx
accent, who gets embroiled in the Revolutionary War. “Revolution” was
proof, if more was needed, that on the Hollywood merry-go-round Pacino
had lost track of who he was. The movie cost twenty-eight million
dollars to make and grossed less than $360,000. It was one disaster too
many.
In a radical move, at the height of his celebrity, Pacino
called a halt to movie-making and moved to Snedens Landing, in
Palisades, New York, with Diane Keaton. There he settled, he said, “into
something that was wonderful with Diane and my life. I didn’t feel
rushed or that I had to put out. I felt relatively content.” The
stoppage was a crucial emotional recalibration. “It is the very nature
of fame that the light is on you a lot,” he said. “I sort of wanted to
turn the light out of my face, so I could see.”
Pacino’s return
to New York was also a return to theatre. He appeared in Dennis
McIntyre’s “National Anthem” at the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven. He
played Mark Antony, in a disastrous “Julius Caesar” at the Public, a
role he could never find his way into. But his main creative focus was
on “The Local Stigmatic,” a little-known 1969 one-act by Heathcote
Williams, about two British ne’er-do-wells who grievously harm a famous
actor whose success enrages them. Pacino produced and starred in a
fascinating film version of the play. “I took almost a year to edit this
fifty-two-minute play,” he said. “I had no one wanting it to work or
not work. It was under my control. I was free.” (The film was never
released theatrically but was included in the DVD boxed set “Pacino: An
Actor’s Vision.”)
Although Pacino remembers this time as
“probably the best period” of his adult life—“It was as close to egoless
as I’ve ever been”—four years into his self-imposed exile from
Hollywood he was running out of money and Keaton was running out of
patience. One day, according to Pacino, she read him the riot act. “What
do you think you’re doing?” he remembers her saying. “Do you think
you’re gonna go back and live in a rooming house again? You’ve been rich
too long, buddy. You can’t go back. You think you’re on the A-list, but
you’re not. You’re out because you put yourself out. You’ve got to go
back to work.” Keaton added, “This script. This is your thing. This is
what you’ve got to do.” She handed him Richard Price’s screenplay for
“Sea of Love.” “It was so sweet of her,” Pacino said. “It was so giving,
so caring. I have to say, she was right.”
“Sea of Love” (1989),
the story of a cop in a midlife crisis who falls for a woman who may be
the killer he’s pursuing, made a star of Ellen Barkin and restored
Pacino’s box-office clout. In the next five years, he made “Dick Tracy,”
“The Godfather, Part III,” “Frankie and Johnny,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,”
“Scent of a Woman,” “Carlito’s Way,” and “Heat.”
As
Pacino paced his living room, a tall, striking woman with long auburn
hair swept in, draped an arm over his shoulders, and pulled him to her,
like a swan taking a cygnet under its wing. Lucila Sola, a
thirty-five-year-old Argentinean actress, spoke in Latin-inflected
English. “I am his longest relationship—seven years,” she said, by way
of introduction. Sola, who studied law and sociology before switching to
acting, is the latest in a long line of strong, smart actresses with
whom Pacino has been involved—Tuesday Weld, Kathleen Quinlan, and Marthe
Keller, among them. The two met at a dinner party in 2005, when his
twins were four and her daughter, Camila, was seven. They were both
dating other people, but their kids got along and they found themselves
going to movies together, swimming in Pacino’s pool, taking trips to San
Diego, the beach. “We were friends. For two years—two years—nothing,”
Sola said. “When people ask, ‘How long have you been together?,’ I say,
‘Forty-nine years.’ A year with Al is like a dog year because it’s so
intense.” She explained, “He’s a medium. He’s channelling something.
When he’s doing a part, it’s hard to be around him because he’s very
different. Al has left the building.”
June 9, 2003“Sorry, sir—we seem to have lost five million dollars in the fog of accounting.”Buy or license » The
conversation turned to Diane Keaton’s bittersweet second memoir, “Let’s
Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty,” which had been published the week before
and in which she discussed “the lure of Al.” “His face, his nose, and
what about those eyes?” Keaton wrote. “I kept trying to figure out what I
could do to make them mine. They never were. . . . For the next twenty
years I kept losing a man I never had.” Sola expounded on the astuteness
of Keaton’s observation. “Al has this ephemeral, childlike quality
about him,” she told me. “His friend Charlie used to say he’s like
smoke. He’s there, but he’s not there. That’s maybe what drove the women
crazy. You want to catch him, but you can’t because Al is—”
“Leave John alone,” Pacino cut in, bringing the conversation effectively to an end.
Sola
had persuaded Pacino to accompany her to a friend’s birthday bowling
party the next day. That evening, complaining about the “fucking bowling
shoes”—“I can’t stand putting on my shoes every day. Imagine putting on
bowling shoes,” he said—Pacino got behind the wheel of his white Range
Rover and headed for Lucky Strike, in Hollywood, which turned out to be
more of a bowling den than an alley.
A bookshelf extended from
the entrance into the large underlit space; jokey signage—a poster
advertising “10 Rules for Sleeping Around”—hung from the walls; from a
distance, beyond the bar, came the echo of ricocheting pins. The
birthday girl, Kam, in blue satin shorts and a diamanté tiara, waved
Pacino and Sola over to the leather banquette where her posse of svelte
girlfriends and their men were huddled. While Sola plunged into the
crowd of chatty celebrants, Pacino took a barstool at a table behind
them and ordered a plate of barbecued chicken. As he ate, the standup
comedian Billy Bellamy, who is credited with coining the phrase “booty
call,” appeared. “We’re blessed, man,” Bellamy said. “I’m blessed. You
killed in that Liberace shit, man.”
“That was Michael Douglas,” Pacino said, wiping barbecue sauce off his fingers.
As
Pacino was putting on his bowling shoes, a Lucky Strike staffer
approached. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said, holding up his cell phone
to indicate a promotional photo op. “But would you mind?”
“I don’t do that,” Pacino said.
Sola pulled him away toward the party. “Once that starts, it’s over,” she said.
Pacino
guttered his first ball. His second swerved left and picked off five
pins. By the next frame, his score was fifteen. He sat down on the sofa.
“I
usually get myself into a Zen place and am just very quiet,” he told me
later. “People give you room when you get real quiet with your
disposition.” At the bowling party, however, the tactic wasn’t working.
The phones came out, and Pacino was swarmed with requests for selfies.
Having done his duty, he slumped back down on the couch. From his body
language, Sola could tell that the night was over. Thirty minutes after
they arrived, she was leading Pacino toward the exit.
In the
garage, he fumbled for his parking ticket and couldn’t find it. “You
know me, I’m in pictures,” he said to the attendant. At the exit, he
struggled again, this time to fit his new ticket correctly into the
machine. The barricade finally lifted. “I’m a natural, baby,” he said,
as he accelerated into the balmy night. “I just pick things up.”
In
mid-2010, Pacino learned that his business manager, Kenneth I. Starr,
had been arrested for embezzling his clients’ money in a Ponzi scheme.
(Starr is currently serving seven and a half years in prison.) There had
been warnings. Early on, Mike Nichols, who had taken his money out of
Starr’s company, had raised suspicions. “I’ll get to it,” Pacino told
Nichols. “Then I never got to it,” he said. “Millions of dollars were
gone,” Sola said. “Gone.”
Pacino took the loss in stride. “I
thought, Hey, this is the world. It’s real,” he said. “Not one day I saw
him down or depressed,” Sola said. “He was, like, ‘O.K., now what do we
do? Roll up our sleeves and go to work.’ ”
Pacino’s agent, John
Burnham, told me, “In his halcyon days he made around fourteen million a
picture, but the industry’s changed. Nowadays, he gets five million.
With a gun—seven million.” It has taken Pacino four years to work
himself back to a position where, he says, “compared to a normal person,
I have a significant amount.” He sold a Snedens Landing property, did
commercials, took out a loan, and signed on for Adam Sandler’s dismal
but profitable “Jack and Jill” (2011)—a “kids’ movie,” according to
Pacino, in which he sent up both his legend and his financial
predicament. In the film’s best moment, a hip-hop ad for Dunkin’ Donuts,
Pacino can be seen dancing and pitching the “Dunkaccino”: “You want
creamy goodness / I’m your friend / Say hello to my chocolate blend.” “I’ve
recently come to terms with the fact that I can only do something I am
creatively connected to,” Pacino told me. “The Humbling,” based on the
2009 Philip Roth novel, which Pacino optioned, is part of that mission.
The novel tells the story of a depressed, aging actor whose talent is
slipping away and who tries to rejuvenate himself through an affair with
a younger woman (who in the movie is played by Greta Gerwig). “I liked
the idea that an actor is losing it and wants to revive not so much his
career as his life, and finds that there’s no life there,” Pacino said.
“He’s trying to be a real person, and discovering that he doesn’t have
the appropriate tools to do this. I felt that these things were sad and
almost farcical.”
Barry Levinson, the director, who enlisted Buck
Henry to write the screenplay, was also taken with the novel. “It was a
great character study,” he said. “We wanted to flesh that out a little
bit more, to apply some of the things that Al’s gone through in his
life, and, hopefully, not in a super-serious fashion. There’s a dark
comedic trail to the piece.” The film was undertaken with a freewheeling
spirit. “We did a lot of improvisation,” Levinson said. “ ‘The
Humbling’ is about as homemade a movie as you can make. We made it for
two million dollars in twenty days. We shot part of it in my house,
because we didn’t have enough money to go somewhere else.”
Pacino’s
legend is based on the films of his youth, for which he drew on his
anger, his sexuality, his energy. The films he’s interested in now tend
to dwell, like “The Humbling,” “Manglehorn,” and “Danny Collins,” on old
age and the issues of decline. They are of a different amperage and a
different spiritual mind-set. They are not, so to speak, the
rock-’em-sock-’em Pacino of old but a new Pacino: a man who is
consolidating his family, regretting some of his life choices, and
living under the strictures of his fame.
In
late June, I met up with Pacino in Boston, one of the twenty-three
cities in which he would be performing “Pacino: One Night Only,” a
business junket disguised as a lap of honor. The promoters referred to
this form of entertainment as “talk theatre.” In essence, Pacino was
taking himself on the road. He had flown in late the previous night from
Ottawa, where he’d sold out a twenty-six-hundred-seat theatre at the
National Arts Centre. In Boston, he was at the Wang Theatre, a fun
palace built to hold thirty-seven hundred customers, who were shelling
out up to a hundred and seventy-nine dollars a seat—plus an extra three
hundred if they wanted to attend a meet-and-greet after the show.
June 14, 2010Buy or license » A
slick eight-minute montage of clips from Pacino’s movies opened the
evening. He told Sonny Corleone, “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s
strictly business”; he shouted, “Attica! Attica!”; he jumped Ellen
Barkin’s bones. When Tony Montana drunkenly turned on the scowling
patrons of a swank restaurant (“Say good night to the bad guy!”), the
audience roared. The lights came up, and Pacino entered to a standing
ovation. He let the volley of sound wrap around him, then, with his
hands clasped together in front of him, he bowed low.
After a few reverent questions from Ty Burr, the Boston Globe’s
film critic, who was his interlocutor for the evening, Pacino picked up
his legend and ran with it: performing as a kid for the deaf aunt
(“started my overacting, I guess”); the high-school teacher who called
him a prodigy (“How do you spell that?”); when he knew he had “it” as an
actor (“I hope I never do”). Pacino played off the hoots of
approval—“riding the bull,” he calls it—taking the audience into his
confidence, and, when he went off course, letting it guide him back to
his story. “Where was I? Oh, yeah—I was a superintendent. . . . I put an
eight-by-ten picture of me on the door—kind of looking handsome.
Underneath, I wrote ‘Super.’ And there wasn’t a girl that went into that
apartment that I didn’t go after!”
Afterward, at the
meet-and-greet, Pacino sat on a stool in front of a camera for
forty-five minutes while premium ticket holders lined up for a
photograph. The night before, he had obliged a blind woman who handed
off her cane and asked him to dance. Tonight, the fans approached him
solemnly, like communicants, uncertain how to arrange themselves beside
their icon. Some leaned in, some stood apart, some asked if it was O.K.
to put an arm around his shoulder. (It was.) One woman planted a kiss on
Pacino’s cheek, then placed a lily and a rose in his lap. Another
woman, in formal evening gloves and a gray dress, who positioned herself
in front of Pacino to speak to him, told me later that she had devoted
her life to theatre after seeing Pacino act in “The Resistible Rise of
Arturo Ui,” on her twenty-first birthday, thirty-nine years before. “He
gave me a passion for the theatre,” she said. “It was a great gift.”
At
Logan International, a private jet was waiting to take Pacino and his
crew to New York. “There’ll be a crowd at the airport,” Pacino warned
me, as the bags were loaded into his two-car convoy. As predicted, a
group of autograph hunters were waiting like spectres outside the
reception area. “It’s their job,” Pacino said. “At first, I didn’t know.
I just thought they were strange people who kind of looked alike, but
they do it for a living.” As he got out of the car, the scrum of about
twenty pushed forward. “Al! Al! Over here, Al!” they called, flourishing
photographs and memorabilia. Head down, Pacino walked straight through
the glass doors and into the bright silence of the lounge.
At
takeoff and landing, Pacino crossed himself and kissed his fingers.
During the flight, he talked about another kind of blessing he’d felt
that day. In the late afternoon, with his bodyguard a hundred feet away,
Pacino had spent an hour on Boston Common, sitting unnoticed on a bench
and watching the passers-by. “It felt like I was back on the block,
back home,” he said. “I felt lonely, but I always feel that way. I could
feel connected to myself, just like when I sat there fifty years ago. I
started there, in that park and that town. I didn’t feel I had changed.
I was still me. The park was still the park. I’ll remember that
moment.” The temporary anonymity had brought “a kind of peace,” which,
he said, “is pretty much a luxury.” Later, he told me, “I haven’t been
in a grocery store or ridden the subway in fifty years. My kids have a
difficult time going out with me publicly. We have yet to go on a
camping trip. But one day I want to rent a small house on a lake. It’s
my dream—I don’t know how to get to it yet, but I’ll give it another
year.” Still, he said, “I’m fine not having anonymity. I’ve learned how
to live with the other thing, and the sort of enjoyment that comes with
that. It ain’t bad.” He added, “Not that I recommend it, but, like they
say, you should try it sometime.” ♦ Watch John Lahr’s commentary on films from Al Pacino’s career.
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