(1979)
by Lawrence Grobel
A candid—and very rare—conversation with the enigmatic actor and superstar.
Al Pacino is pacing in his camper, parked on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, the location for the day’s shooting of his latest and most controversial picture, Cruising. While waiting for director William Freidkin to set up the next shot, he tries to relax by reading aloud all the parts from Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui to his hair stylist , secretary and make-up man. Down the street, behind a police barricade, he can hear faint shouts and the shrill whistles of the gay activists who have gathered to protest the making of this picture, which deals with homosexual murders.“There they go,” Pacino says, interrupting his reading. “Sounds like day crickets.” The people in the camper smile, but no one is laughing, especially Pacino, who has found himself in the midst of a controversy he doesn’t understand. All his life he has shied away from social movements, political issues, marches, protests. Then, last summer, he did Richard III on Broadway—the first “Richard” done on Broadway in 30 years—and many of the critics attacked him so fiercely it seemed vindicative. No sooner did that play complete its run than Cruising began. And, once again, the press was provoked. For an actor who considers himself removed from such furor, and a man who has passionately avoided the press, the spotlight has suddenly been turned strongly his way—and this is the only major interview he has ever granted.Alfredo James Pacino has traveled a great distance from the South Bronx of his childhood to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he lives today. He was born April 25, 1940; his father left his mother when he was two, and he was raised by a protective mother and grandparents.Nicknamed Sonny, his friends often called him The Actor, and though a prankster throughout his school years, in junior high he was voted most likely to succeed, mainly in recognition of his acting abilities. But what he really wanted to be was a baseball player. When they started teaching Stanislavsky’s acting principles (the Method) at the High School of Performing Arts, which he attended, he thought nothing could be more boring. He made it only through his sophomore year before the money ran out and the pressure to get a job surpassed the need to continue his education.The succession of jobs brought him in contact with all kinds of characters. He was a messenger, shoe salesman, supermarket checker, shoe shiner, furniture mover, office boy, fresh-fruit polisher, newsboy. But he also sensed that he could be more, so he auditioned for Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, while a teenager. Rejected but undeterred, he enrolled in another actor’s studio, Herbert Berghof Studios, where he met the man who would become his mentor and closest friend, Charlie Laughton. Laughton not only taught acting and directed him in his first public play (William Saroyan’s “Hello Out There”) but also wrote poetry and introduced him to poets and writers. Pacino was accepted by the Strasberg studio four years later.In the mid-sixties, he and a friend started writing comedy revues, which they performed in coffeehouses in Greenwich Village. He was also acting in plays in warehouses and basements. He appeared in numerous plays, including “Awake and Sing!” and “America, Hurrah”. In 1966, he received his first recognition in an off-off-Broadway production of “Why Is A Crooked Letter”. Two years later, he won an Obie for Best Actor in an off-Broadway production of “The Indian Wants the Bronx.” The following year, 1969, he was awarded his first Tony—the legitimate theater’s Oscar—for his Broadway performance in “Does A Tiger Wear a Necktie?”Like Marlon Brando after his major stage debut in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Pacino was lured by Hollywood. He was offered about a dozen pictures before he and his then manager, Marty Bregman, decided to choose The Panic in Needle Park (though he did appear in a bit part in a Patty Duke movie called, Me, Natalie). Panic was a strange and disturbing film about a New York drug addict, and has only now picked up a cult following.There was something, however, about Pacino that made another newcomer in Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola, choose him for a film he was about to do on the Mafia. Coppola had big ideas. He wanted not only this relatively unknown actor to play a major role in his film but also another actor not considered bankable at the time: Marlon Brando. The studio balked twice, but Coppola insisted. The result was The Godfather, a film that reversed the downward trend of Brando’s career and that shot Al Pacino into the ranks of stardom.Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, Pacino was insulted (he was onscreen longer than Brando, who won—and refused—the Oscar that year) and boycotted the awards ceremony. For his third movie, Scarecrow, he chose a freewheeling rover on the road with an ex-con, played by Gene Hackman. An unsuccessful picture, it became Pacino’s most upsetting experience with the movie industry.Still, he responded with another recognized performance in Serpico, the New York cop who exposed the New York police force for taking bribes and almost lost his life for it. This time he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. His third Oscar nomination came after his strongest performance to date, as Michael Corleone in Godfather II. This was the movie that proved that Pacino was among the rare breed of actors who would leave their mark in American cinema history.It was a controlled and troubling performance, which put him in the hospital for exhaustion halfway through the production. But when it was completed, he signed to do another controversial and memorable film, Dog Day Afternoon, in which he played a bisexual bank robber. For the fourth time, he was nominated for an Oscar.Hollywood continued to recognize his enormous talent, but he was still an outsider. He refused to move to California, preferring to live in a small, unpretentious apartment in Manhattan; and he refused to consider himself solely a movie actor. Pacino feels his roots are in the theater, and he returns whenever the pressure of being a movie “star” become too great.His next movie was Bobby Deerfield, the story of a superstar race-car driver going through and identity crisis. It was also the story of Pacino and his co-star, Marthe Keller, who became an item when they decided to extend their relationship offscreen as she moved in with him. But the film didn’t work for Pacino or the public. He decided to return to Broadway to do “Richard III.”But before he did, he completed one more picture, …And Justice for All, directed by Norman Jewison. Just released , it tells the story of an ethical lawyer fighting corruption in the judicial system. Once again, Pacino displays a wide range of acting ability that will almost certainly earn him his fifth Oscar nomination.While his professional life has turned him into a superstar and a wealthy man (he received over $1,000,000 for …And Justice for All), his private life remains somewhat in turmoil. When he was still in his teens, he lived with a woman for a number of years. When the broke up, he lived for short periods with other women, until he met Jill Clayburgh. They lived together for five years. When that broke up (she married playwriter David Rabe), he had a relationship with Tuesday Weld, and then with Marthe Keller. That too, ended about a year and a half ago, and Pacino, who will soon turn 40, remains, like so many of the characters he plays, alone. But his attitude toward relationships and what he wants out of life is changing, as Lawrence Grobel (whose last “Playboy Interview” was with Godfather One, Marlon Brando) discovered. His report:“My first impression of Pacino’s lifestyle brought to mind a line from “Hamlet”: “I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.” His three-room apartment consists of a small kitchen with worn appliances whose toilet is always running, and a living room that is furnished like a set for a way-off-off-Broadway production of some down-and-out city dweller. I know poor people who live in more luxury than this, I thought. Which made me instantly like this man, whose material needs are obviously slight. All around the living room, were dog-eared paperback copies of Shakespeare’s plays and stacks of scripts, including one that Costa-Garvas had recently given him based on Andre Malraux’s “Man’s Fate.”“For the next two weeks, I saw Pacino every evening and some afternoons, our talks often continuing into the early hours of the morning. For an hour or two, he would sit or lie on the couch, then jump up and go into the kitchen to light a cigarette from the stove, check the time, walk around a bit. One night I smelled something burning and we ran into the kitchen to see a potholder in flames on the stove. Pacino picked up the teakettle and calmly, as if such things happened all the time, put out the fire. On another night, I arrived to find him downstairs in the hall, picking up the pieces of a broken Perrier bottle that he had dropped on his way to the elevator. “People wouldn’t believe I do this, but I do,” he said.During our first few meetings, Pacino had trouble completing his thoughts—his mind jumped, his sentences dangled, he spoke in dashes and ellipses. But as we got to know each other, his sentences and thoughts became complete. He was fascinated with the actual process of being interviewed. “Nobody ever asked me for opinions,” he said.We finished the interview on a Saturday and I was scheduled to fly back to L.A the next evening. Sunday morning, Pacino called, wanting to know when my plane was leaving. When I told him, he said, “Well, that gives us enough time for one more talk.” I put the batteries back into my tape recorders and grabbed a taxi to his place.“Finally, it was time to say good-bye. I had 40 hours of talk on tape and close to 2000 pages of transcription to reduce. “I feel like I have played ball with you,” Pacino said as I left. “Like we know the same candy store or we remember that time when we opened a hydrant or something. It is a good feeling”. I smiled and nodded. That was exactly how I felt about him. And I think some of that good feeling comes through in the interview. Along with the doubts and hesitations, which he continued to express over the phone after I arrived in Los Angeles. He may never do another interview, but for this one, Al Pacino definitely was talking.”