Sonny Boy by Al Pacino: ‘I was broke – I only had 90 grand’
SONNY BOY by Al Pacino (Century £25, 384pp)
Things are different when you’re a movie star. In 1985, after a series of unsuccessful films, Al Pacino decided to retire, concentrating on theatre work instead.
Then, four years later, he realised he was broke and would need to start making films again. His definition of broke? ‘I had about ninety grand in the bank and that was it.’
Of course, film-star finances have to be viewed in the context of film-star lifestyles. Elsewhere in his autobiography, Pacino reveals that, at one point, his monthly outgoings were three or four hundred thousand dollars (‘which is a lot of moolah’).
Mind you, this was partly due to an untrustworthy accountant: ‘Even though I had only two cars, I was somehow paying for 16, along with 23 cell phones I didn’t know about.’
His income from Scarface – ‘still the biggest film I ever did’ – could support him on its own. Or rather it could ‘if I lived like a normal person’.
I once discussed Pacino with a friend, and said that I would happily pay to watch him read the New York phone book.
My friend agreed, adding: ‘He wouldn’t even have to read it out loud.’
The man has animal charisma, the quality which keeps you watching, no matter how mundane the scene he’s in, no matter how average the movie as a whole, because you know that, at any second, he could suddenly do something completely barking mad.
It was his mother who called him ‘Sonny Boy’ – the woman who brought him up alone after his father left before Al was two.
Al Pacino in Scarface
She was always a troubled soul and attempted suicide when Al was six. Fifteen years later, she choked to death on pills. He’s unsure whether it was a repeat attempt: ‘I’d like to give my mother that benefit of the doubt, that dignity.’
In the end, his father married five times (‘me, not even once – I guess we balanced each other out that way’), and opened a restaurant called Pacino’s.
‘When somebody would say to me, “He’s trying to trade on your name,” I would say: “Hey, schmuck – that’s the name I got from him.”’
His 20s were spent in theatre, but Pacino knew that movie stardom beckoned: ‘I always felt as though I had a natural connection with a camera.’
In just his third film he was proved right, his performance as Michael Corleone in The Godfather propelling him to fame. When he told his grandmother that he’d got the part, she replied that his grandfather had come from the Sicilian town of Corleone.
Just before shooting his first scene with Marlon Brando, on location in a New York hospital, he ate lunch with his fellow actor: ‘He was sitting on one hospital bed, I was sitting on the other . . .
‘He was eating chicken cacciatore with his hands. His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face.’
Pacino wondered if he should fetch Brando a napkin.
‘Before I could, he spread both his hands across the white hospital bed and smeared the sheets with red sauce. . . I thought: “Is that how movie stars act? You can do anything”.’
Mafioso: Marlon Brando (right) with Al Pacino, filming the Godfather
Until recently, Pacino had never seen the film in its entirety: ‘I don’t know why. Maybe I felt that because I was in it, I wouldn’t be a good audience for it.’
But at a 50th anniversary event he did settle down for the duration, and was as impressed as the rest of us.
Not that he hadn’t known what the film meant to people. Soon after it came out, he was ‘standing at a kerb, waiting for the light to change, and this pretty redhead was standing there with me. I looked at her. She looked at me. I said “Hi”. She said, “Hi, Michael”. And I just went, whoa. Oh my God. Anonymity, sweet pea, the light of my life, my survival tool – that’s gone now. You don’t appreciate it till you lose it’.
The strangeness of fame hasn’t affected only him. Years later, when his daughter was about eight, she asked: ‘Dad, are you Al Pacino?’
The book has some lovely insights into the star’s most famous roles. While preparing to portray a blind man in Scent Of A Woman, Pacino was taught how to disassemble a gun and put it back together.
Al with Michelle Pfeiffer filming Scarface
Whenever he got it right, the military officer who was training him would shout, ‘hoooooo-ah!’ – and ‘I said to myself, “That’s going into the picture”.’
And being driven to the set for Serpico, in which he played a policeman, Pacino became annoyed by the exhaust fumes of a nearby truck. Instructing his driver to get level with it, he flashed his cop’s badge and shouted: ‘Pull over to the side of the road, you son of a bitch. You’re polluting the air.’
He wisely decided against carrying the threat any further.
Pacino is 84 now and the whole book has the feeling of a man at peace with himself and the world (it wasn’t always that way). He’s still got that glint in the eye, that air of unpredictability – and, crucially, the ability to laugh at life.
At one point, production of Scarface had to be halted when the machine gun he fires during the final battle scene (the ‘leetle friend’ to which enemies are invited to ‘say hello’) became so hot that it fused itself to his hand.
He went to hospital, where a nurse asked the same question as his daughter: ‘Are you Al Pacino?’ He confirmed that he was.
‘Oh,’ came the reply. ‘I thought you were some scumbag.’