Sonny Boy: A Memoir

Connecting emotionally with a memoir is a tricky thing.

Sometimes, it’s the just the powerful way the author tells his or her story. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt is a good example. Very few of us have been raised in the bleak poverty of an Irish slum and yet millions of readers made McCourt—previously a high school writing teacher—a literary star and cherished his compelling story of rising from that slum, arriving in America and becoming a success.

Other times, you read a memoir because you’re familiar with the author’s career and want to delve into their psyche to learn more about their insights than you could in a People magazine takeout. That’s the case with Al Pacino’s memoir Sonny Boy.

Pacino is one of the iconic actors of the last 50 years, an heir to Brando. It’s impossible to separate Pacino from any number of films like The Godfather, Scarface and Serpico to name a choice few. Pacino doesn’t skimp on stories of his hobnobbing with the rich and very famous, bold-faced names like Liz Taylor, Marlon Brando, and Francis Ford Coppola.

Pretty much everyone knows by now that no one wanted Pacino in The Godfather except for Coppola. After the initial scenes were shot, Pacino says things looked even worse. Coppola called and told Pacino to meet him at the Ginger Man, a restaurant on the upper west side where the director was eating with his family and a small group of friends.

Coppola did not invite Pacino to sit down. Pacino explains what happened next: “I continued to stand there, alone, as he sat there with his family looking up at me. Finally, Francis said, ‘You know how much you mean to me, how much faith I have in you . . . well, you’re not cutting it.’”

Coppola told Pacino to look at the early rushes and said, “Why don’t you take a look at yourself? Because I don’t think it’s working. You’re not working.”

The next day, Coppola rearranged the shooting schedule to shoot the famous Italian restaurant scene where Michael Corleone makes his bones by shooting two men, one of them a cop. Pacino spent 15 hours in that restaurant as the scene unfolded and became movie magic. Pacino restored his reputation and was soon having lunch alone with Marlon Brando.

The scene was right out of a movie. They were eating in a hospital where they were shooting and sitting on opposite beds and Brando was eating chicken cacciatore with his hands. “His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face,” Pacino writes. He wondered if Brando was going to ask him to get rid of the plate or get him a napkin but instead Brando “spread both his hands across the white hospital bed and smeared the sheets with red sauce, without even thinking about it, and he kept on talking. And I thought, is that how movie stars act? You can do anything.”

“Brando looked at me with those gentle eyes of his and said, ‘Yeah, kid, you’re gonna be all right.’”

There’s a lot of memorable stories in these pages but, for this for this reviewer, it’s Pacino’s early life that resonates. He, too, was raised in a working-class neighborhood of the Bronx. He hung out with childhood friends and had crazy adventures from running on rooftops to stealing fruit. It’s all so familiar.

As a young teen, Pacino took the subway downtown to “the city” and discovered the greatest adventure of them all—Manhattan. He regales with stories of how open it all was back in the ’60s when he suddenly found himself starring in the off-Broadway play The Indian Wants the Bronx.

It didn’t matter than he had dropped out of the High School for Performing Arts. He had no head shots or resume, but he had talent and writers and directors took notice, and he was in demand. (Actually, Pacino’s creation myth is not so different than Barbra Streisand’s.) The word got out and soon, Coppola noticed him.

As Pacino tells us, he didn’t know what he was doing his entire life. He says he never learned anything, just went from one project to the next, feeling his way and acting more or less on instinct. He had a love of acting that carried him through but, as he acknowledges in one of the later chapters, he admits he was incredibly lucky.

At a dinner for the Director’s Guild honoring Coppola, he glances across the room and sees an old guy about his age. The old guy was a busboy, but he was wearing a tuxedo as the planners of the event required. And then, Pacino recognizes him. He’s a guy from Pacino’s old Bronx neighborhood he has not seen in 40 years and the last time he did see him, he was yelling at him to hurry and jump from one rooftop to another to avoid the cops who were chasing him.

“Now here we were . . . two kids from the block. We had come to positions in life that were far apart—I was this famous actor, and he was a busboy, but it didn’t change how we related to each other, and why should it?”

Pacino writes that, now that he’s older, he keeps returning to that time of his life, the times in the Bronx. “It’s staggering to me that these things really happened to me, and I can’t even prove it anymore.” All of his old haunts are gone, but he knew he was there and it’s incredible to him. We know how he feels.