Al Pacino’s memoir is casual, conversational and occasionally cryptic
“Sonny Boy” dives deep into Pacino’s career highlights and low points but holds back when it comes to the actor’s relationships.
At 84, after a lifetime on stage and screen, Al Pacino — currently filming an adaptation of “King Lear” — is not exactly slowing down. That’s despite the recent, temporary loss of his voice after surgery, a longtime (and worsening) eye ailment and what he describes, in his otherwise breezily readable memoir, “Sonny Boy,” as a bout of covid that left him close enough to death to experience the “nothing” on the other side.
You could say he’s in a reflective mood.
That’s good news for fans of the actor, who describes himself as shy and has long disliked publicity. A revealing 2022 interview with Dave Itzkoff was a rare recent exception. Itzkoff, who gets a thank you in this book’s acknowledgments for his “considerable help and persistence” in getting the author to “turn corners I never would have turned,” offered what Pacino, through the book’s publicist, describes as editorial support for “Sonny Boy.” In these new pages, Itzkoff appears to have once again found a way to coax his collaborator out of his shell.
There are, however, some moments of frustrating reticence in this life story, captured in a spontaneous, conversational tone that often sounds like Pacino simply sat down in front of a tape deck and hit “record.” That sense of voice and aliveness, however, is what’s best about “Sonny Boy.”
Although the actor describes the writing process as “ratting on myself,” there’s a tension between confession and reserve that runs throughout its chapters. Looking back at his batting average over a long career — which has included, as Pacino notes with good humor, more Razzie nominations (five) than Oscars (one, for “Scent of a Woman”) — the actor writes, “About half of my performances were working, about half were not so much, and some were in the toilet.” But, he adds, “I’m only human.”
When it comes to love and family, on the other hand, he’s less frank. Pacino, who has never married, has four children, including his most recent son, born last year, with then-girlfriend Noor Alfallah, who is more than 50 years his junior. The child of a broken home, Pacino was raised by his mother and grandparents, vowing to be a better father than his own. Although it seems like he has been a good one, he admits to never being able to give his twins, Anton and Olivia — born to ex Beverly D’Angelo in 2001 — the attention they “desired or deserved.”
Career too often called him away, he explains. And relationships — with actresses Jill Clayburgh, Tuesday Weld, Marthe Keller, Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Keaton, in addition to D’Angelo — were left to fizzle out as a way of avoiding what Pacino calls “the pain train.” Each of these women gets short shrift in the book. Even Keller, whose relationship with Pacino was, he says, the closest he ever came to getting married, merits only a page or two.
He’s more forthcoming about, for instance, his ineptitude with money and the vicissitudes of fame. After the early success and acclaim of “The Godfather,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and other classics of the 1970s, the actor found himself, in the 1980s, slipping into what he calls obscurity with such mediocre fare as “Author! Author!,” “Revolution” and “Cruising.” (Pacino tells of coming to accept that the gay-themed serial-killer thriller was exploitative; he ultimately put his salary in an irrevocable trust and donated the money. Good for him.)
Even 1983’s “Scarface” was initially met by lukewarm reviews. The cult film is now often cited as one of Pacino’s better, if more over-the-top performances, and the actor jokes that he could probably live on the residuals from that Brian De Palma crime drama alone — “if I lived like a normal person.”
In the late 1980s, Pacino almost went broke after not working, by choice, for about four years. It was Keaton, then his girlfriend, who made him take a part in “Sea of Love” — “for the moolah” — that put him back on the map. Yet he would be almost brought to ruin again, in 2011, after being cheated by his corrupt accountant.
Slowly a picture comes into focus: of a kid from the South Bronx who dropped out of the High School of Performing Arts; of a meticulous and sometimes mercurial Method actor who became an accidental movie star when cast by an unknown Francis Ford Coppola in “The Godfather”; of a man for whom performing is all, and who is incapable of doing anything else.
Pacino has been called difficult, and it’s clear why. He writes of insisting that a scene in “The Godfather Part II” be reshot — to the consternation of Coppola and his crew — to capture his character’s reaction to a wine glass being knocked over. But he omits any mention of having his jaw wired shut in the first “Godfather,” the better to replicate his character Michael Corleone’s clenched delivery after he gets punched in the face by a police captain.
The push and pull between being open and taciturn, between acute self-awareness and occasional cluelessness, continues throughout the book. Pacino writes of using alcohol and drugs as a crutch until 1977’s “Bobby Deerfield,” but doesn’t say why precisely he needed them. He talks about eventually finding therapy, but without going into detail. In 2015, when he starred in David Mamet’s widely panned “China Doll” on Broadway, The Washington Post wrote that Pacino “glances at regular intervals into the wings, giving the impression that he is searching there for [his character’s] next utterance.” That’s because Pacino, who believed he had the character down pat, wasn’t able — or couldn’t be bothered — to learn the lines. He then discovered what he describes, perplexingly, as “the greatest thing that I have found late in my acting life”: teleprompters hidden in the wings.
The actor’s reliance on such a cheat comes in stark contrast to an earlier passage in which Pacino writes of the epiphany he had in his early 20s during a production of August Strindberg’s “Creditors.” It was the first moment he knew he was meant for the acting life. “Words are coming out, and they’re the words of Strindberg, but I’m saying them as though they’re mine,” he writes, in a passage that beautifully captures the transcendence of channeling another human being. “The world is mine, and my feelings are mine, and they’re going beyond the South Bronx. I left the familiar. I became a part of something larger.”
If there’s one main theme here, it’s the debt of gratitude this born artist feels he owes his mother, a troubled, at times suicidal soul who first instilled the love of performance in her son by taking him to the movies. After seeing “The Lost Weekend” as a 5-year-old, Pacino recalls, he entertained his family by acting out the scene in which Ray Milland’s character, a recovering alcoholic, frantically searches for hidden booze.
If he ever gets to heaven — and he’s not sure he will, given the ups and downs of his life — Pacino says that all he wants to do is deliver a message to the woman whose nickname for him lends the book its title. “Hey, Ma,” he says he’ll tell her, “see what happened to me?”
Michael O’Sullivan was a staff writer and editor for The Washington Post, contributing reviews and features on film, fine art, theater and other entertainment."
Sonny Boy
Penguin Press. 370 pp. $35
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