SONNY BOY: A MEMOIR
By Al Pacino
Century, Rs 1,399
Sometime in the late 50s, or perhaps the early 60s, if you happened to be in one of Manhattan’s alleyways and the hour was late, you would, in all probability, come across “someone… with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night…” That “someone”, Al Pacino confides in his memoir, was him, “training [himself] on the great Shakespeare soliloquies”. This image of a young man — neither Hollywood nor the world had taken note of him yet — one in between jobs, poorly dressed, and often starving, conveys two important things about Pacino: his obsession with the arts, chiefly avant-garde theatre, something that he would be consumed by all his life, and, second, his outlier identity. For Pacino, even though he traced his roots to the streets of South Bronx, was and always remained, in a sense, the quintessential outsider, to the city and the minders of its institutions, to the conniving, incestuous worlds of art and entertainment with their charmed, exclusive inner circles, to all that was symbolic of status quo and order.
Pacino’s deep engagement with his craft perhaps comes through best in his analysis of his absorption of and, equally, exhaustion with the character, Michael Corleone (The Godfather series) which, ironically, was the key that opened the door to Hollywood’s attendant fame and pitfalls. “I thought I was engaging in the role. But I was in a Michael Corleone trance and doing the part took a lot out of me. I did understand Michael… but… [h]e went to certain places within himself and getting myself there took some effort.”
Unfortunately, even though there is enough of Pacino reflecting on his art, cinematic performances in cult films other than The Godfather I/II (Serpico, Scarface, Carlito’s Way), and on his childhood, Sonny Boy only throws a few scraps around when it comes to his personal life. There are honest hints about his alcoholism, his befuddlement with Hollywood’s proverbial red carpet and, later in life, with LA, but he still leaves the prurient reader/fan sighing in disappointment as he remains steadfastly decorous about his co-stars and the women in his life. There is not too much on his interactions and association with, say, Marlon Brando (except for a lunch incident) or Robert De Niro. He does better with Francis Ford Coppola, even slipping in a detail about the director “bawling like a baby” in a graveyard after having been denied what he wanted while shooting The Godfather. There’s a lot on his fecund collaboration with the film producer, Marty Bregman. What would leave the serious reader grumbling is Pacino’s inability to reveal the potential of and the conflicts within America’s counterculture (why wasn’t the off-Broadway phenomenon fleshed out in detail?).
The staccato, rasping undertone to the narrative, reminiscent of Pacino’s dialogue delivery, lingers, especially when the veteran actor, now in his 80s, reflects on reaching a crossroads in life. Sonny Boy, he says poignantly, is his bid to find his way back home.